Actors and actresses in Indian cinema tend to have light skin tones, and Indian cinematographers have used graphics and intense lighting to achieve more "desirable" skin tones. Fair skin tones are advertised as an asset in Indian marketing.Skin-whitening products have remained popular over time, often due to historical beliefs and perceptions about fair skin. Sales of skin-whitening products across the world grew from $40 billion to $43 billion in 2008. In South and East Asian countries, people have traditionally seen light skin as more attractive, and a preference for lighter skin remains prevalent. In ancient China and Japan, for example, pale skin can be traced back to ancient drawings depicting women and goddesses with fair skin tones. In ancient China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, pale skin was seen as a sign of wealth. Thus skin-whitening cosmetic products are popular in East Asia. Four out of ten women surveyed in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea used a skin-whitening cream, and more than 60 companies globally compete for Asias estimated $18 billion market. Changes in regulations in the cosmetic industry led to skin-care companies introducing harm-free skin lighteners. In Japan, the geisha have a reputation for their white-painted faces, and the appeal of the bihaku (美白), or "beautiful white", ideal leads many Japanese women to avoid any form of tanning. There are exceptions to this, with Japanese fashion trends such as ganguro emphasizing tanned skin.
An oft-cited anecdote in support of the vitamin D hypothesis is that Arctic populations whose skin is relatively dark given their latitude, such as the Inuit and the Lapp, have had a diet that is historically rich in vitamin D. Sensitivity of modern humans to vitamin D deficiency is evident from the widespread occurrence of rickets in 19th-century industrial Europe, but whether dark-skinned humans migrating to polar latitudes tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago experienced similar problems is open to question. In any case, a risk for vitamin D deficiency can only explain selection for light skin. Among several mechanisms suggested to provide a selective advantage for dark skin in conditions of high UV irradiation (Loomis 1967; Robins 1991; Jablonski and Chaplin 2000), the most tenable are protection from sunburn and skin cancer due to the physical barrier imposed by epidermal melanin. Dark skin
All modern humans share a common ancestor who lived around 200,000 years ago in Africa. Comparisons between known skin pigmentation genes in chimpanzees and modern Africans show that dark skin evolved along with the loss of body hair about 1.2 million years ago and that this common ancestor had dark skin. Investigations into dark-skinned populations in South Asia and Melanesia indicate that skin pigmentation in these populations is due to the preservation of this ancestral state and not due to new variations on a previously lightened population. MC1R
The melanocortin 1 receptor (MC1R) gene is primarily responsible for determining whether pheomelanin and eumelanin are produced in the human body.