The Shelf Was Never Built for You
Walk into any chemist in Bengaluru or Bhopal and the anti-ageing aisle still skews heavily toward brightening serums designed for skin that tans minimally and ages with fine lines rather than hyperpigmentation. That was not an accident. For most of the post-liberalisation era, the beauty industry in India was run on a simple assumption: that the global formulation was close enough. A moisturiser developed for temperate, low-humidity climates got a Hindi tagline and a local face on the packaging. The skin underneath was beside the point.
