Skin lightening: The process of exploiting colorism-based opportunities

People with dark skin can be discriminated against, generating various adverse outcomes for them. Due to this colorism, entrepreneurs have exploited colorism-based opportunities—products and services that lighten skin color. Through an inductive qualitative study of skin-lightening businesses and their customers in cities across India, we move beyond supply and demand economics to theorize the psychological and social drivers that motivate people to treat the symptoms of this discrimination (yet, in doing so, reinforce this discrimination and exacerbate income inequality). Therefore, the study contributes to the entrepreneurship literature with new research on the process of exploiting colorism-based opportunities and their positive and (unintended) negative consequences. Executive summary We set out to explore the business of skin lightening. The skin-lightening industry is large in scale and scope. Entrepreneurs and their customers aim to lighten skin color to avoid or minimize colorism. Colorism is a “social hierarchy based on gradations of skin tone within and between racial/ethnic groups” ( Glenn, 2008 : 2811) in which individuals with darker skin are disadvantaged compared to those with lighter skin. While there is substantial research on racism, in comparison, research on colorism is limited, especially on how entrepreneurs exploit opportunities to alleviate some of the discrimination their customers face because of their darker skin color. We use the term colorism-based opportunity to refer to a situation in which an entrepreneur can offer a product or service to reduce how much an individual is perceived (by themselves and others) as inferior because of their darker skin tone.