Hindustan Unilever Limited announced that the company has renamed its popular skin care brand Fair & Lovely to “Glow & Lovely.” The company in a statement said that “We now announce that we will remove the word ‘Fair’ from our brand name Fair & Lovely. The new name is awaiting regulatory approvals, and the pack with the revised name will be available in the market in the next few months”.
They further added that this move is an effort by the company to foray into “the evolution of its skin care portfolio to a more inclusive vision of Positive Beauty.”
Glow & Lovely will be available in the next few months. The Men’s range of Fair & Lovely will be called ‘Glow & Handsome’. Fair & Lovely accounts for 40% of the face care category in India.
Cosmetics brands across the world have quite often come under criticism over products that promote skin fairness. French cosmetics major L’Oreal Group recently in a major announcement has said that they will drop words such as white, fair and light from all its skincare products & FMCG giant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) stopped the sale of its skin-whitening creams globally, including in India.
Other FMCG brands like Emami, which owns fairness cream brand Fair & Handsome, had said that they are evaluating the current situation. The company threatened legal action against HUL as it has already changed the name of its men’s fairness cream to ‘Emami Glow & Handsome’ and launched the brand digitally last week.
“Although shocked, we are not surprised to note HUL’s unfair business practice, which has been prevalent time & again to damage our brand image,” Emami said.
According to Jefferies analysts Vivek Maheshwari and Kunal Shah “Purely from a business perspective, there will be uncertainty as consumer acceptance will hold the key,”. “We recall around 2012, HUL changed the Fair & Lovely cream colour from white to pink along with a packaging change, which met with a push back from the consumer.”
So will this name change from Fair & Lovely to “Glow & Lovely” & Fair & Handsome to “Glow & Handsome” will affect the trade of HUL remains to be seen and that too in this pandemic times.
