How much blood are you willing to shed to be radiant? Well, 20 cc is all you need. Blood is taken from your body, 4 cc of platelets are separated, and you can choose between having it applied to your face like a paste or injected into it, in order to look several shades lighter.

The Vampire Facial, technically known as Plasma Rich Platelets (PRP), is the latest craze-from Kim Kardashian and Madonna to India's beauty pageant aspirants, winners, and top Bollywood actors along with their spouses, who partake of it with regularity. The tissue on the face is bruised with a derma-roller, a cylinder-shaped medical drum studded with fine needles, before PRP is applied.

The lightness of being The lightness of being

Far from a medical atrocity, the Vampire Facial is being hailed by medical practitioners as one of the saner methods of aesthetic lightening. According to Dr Aamod Rao, a cosmetic surgeon who performs the procedure at a clinic in Khar, Mumbai, the procedure is safe for two reasons: "First, it puts your own nutrients back into your skin, in places where they otherwise wouldn't have reached. Second, there are no chances of an allergic rejection since it's your own blood." Rao even recommends it as injections into the scalp for better hair.

The Vampire Facial requires six sittings of 30 minutes each, and seven to 15 days afterwards for the face to heal. Its effect lasts for about a year. Rao says there is a steep rise even in the number of men asking for the procedure, typically priced at Rs 3,000-Rs 15,000 per sitting, depending on the quality of the products one opts for. The technique is now being combined with new therapies such as fat fillers that suck the fat out of one part of your body and reinject it for breast or buttock augmentation. The result: Fairer and brighter behinds.

But the procedure, one of several available in a cosmetics clinic, underlines an age-old Bollywood prejudice, where dark-skinned actors find it hard to survive in the midst of a film industry where people are willing to shed blood to be whiter.

Usha Jadhav, National Award winner of the 2012 Marathi film Dhag, who plays the mother in Bhootnath Returns, is accustomed to the discrimination. "There's a belief that dark-skinned people are incapable of romance," she laughs. Before the National Award, people would tell her bluntly that she was too dark for roles. After the award, she says the discrimination has become more oblique. "They will tell me I'm a good actor, that they 'respect me'. Then, why not cast me? It's simply because I don't fit the fair-and-lovely stereotype."

Jadhav is one of the few who are challenging a $1.2 billion Indian skincare industry that grew at 20 per cent in 2013. One-fourth of this industry is devoted to skin whitening, according to Bloomberg, while 10 per cent of the market is targeted towards men. While the rural market for skin whitening creams is the new hot segment, skin whitening in urban areas is getting more specialised. Armpit, thigh and vaginal whitening are the hot new entrants. While Emami is the market leader in men's fairness products (Unilever and L'Oreal also offer similar products), Clean and Dry by MidasCare Pharmaceuticals is the market leader in vaginal lightening. According to a Bloomberg report, the demand for fairness products alone has boosted Hindustan Unilever's sales by 15 per cent annually over the last three years.

Most skin-whitening products use extracts of niacinamide, a Vitamin B derivative obtained from poultry and fish, as the key ingredient. They block melanin-producing enzymes for a few hours. The Vampire Facial is merely one of its painful options. According to Dr Chaitali Gandhi, a dermatologist and cosmetologist with the Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai, another new procedure on the block is Lysate Treatment. Similar to Vampire Facial, Lysate uses a solution that is "more powerful and potent". In it, the patient's blood is processed to extract growth factors in customised doses for specific indications. The treatment is in fact a form of regenerative stem cell therapy that is typically used to manage extreme pain in case of diseases such as slip discs and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. That people are willing to undergo it for cosmetic reasons is indicative of just how deep the whiteness complex lies in the Indian psyche.

Besides these, less extreme options include chemical peels, red light therapy for those with sensitive skin, pumpkin facials which use organo phytic acids, and oxy facials which use an ultrasound machine.

At the small clinic in Worli where he consults, Dr Anil Tibrewala, a senior plastic surgeon at Hinduja and Saifee hospitals in Mumbai, sees the steady stream of people asking him for skin lightening techniques get younger and younger every day. He does not perform the extreme whitening procedures for cosmetic purposes alone. "I perform these procedures for those who have extensive small pox scarring, or acne that disfigures the face, or in cases where the impact on the patient is psychological, such as depression, and they cannot function in society without some form of surgery," he says.

Tibrewala's full-face Diamond Dermabrasion has diamond needles running over the face, taking off the outer layer, leaving it "paper white". The process takes an hour under general anaesthesia. After one to two weeks of healing, it requires another six to eight weeks for the skin's natural pigmentation to kick back in, during which time the patient cannot be exposed to sunlight. The lure for cosmetic whitening, he says, is more for those who come from small towns. He finds there is now greater acceptance of dark skin among educated urban Indians.

It is a stereotype that Ashvini Yardi, film producer and former channel head at Zee TV, has tried to combat. When she wrote Saat Phere, the television show about dark skin prejudices in 2005, she based it on her maid, whom she had observed stealing saffron from her fridge to make herself fair. "There is some acceptance of actors such as Bipasha Basu and Priyanka Chopra, but the perception-pushed whether through entertainment and matrimonial advertisement-is the same: Fair is beautiful." Jadhav believes that things can change if younger directors put their weight behind dark-skinned actors.

Varun Thakur, a stand-up comic and indie film-maker who made the spoof Gore Gote, a film about a fairness cream for the testicles, believes the first step has to be holding the notion up for ridicule. If only Bollywood would stop shedding blood and follow suit.

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