Just like Dove aired those inane mini-soap operas starring Alicia Keys earlier this year, another brand owned by Unilever, Pond's, is airing soap opera-esque commercials to promote products in India. But unlike those boring Keys spots, the Pond's ads, for a product called White Beauty, have sparked major protests.

White Beauty is certainly not the first skin lightening product with commercial that shocks us westerners, but the premise of the three-part soap opera ad — a man leaves a darker-skinned woman for a fair-skinned woman, causing the former girlfriend to lighten her skin to win him back — has a lot of people talking about color complexes in India. It helps that the three actors in the ads are big Bollywood stars.

CONTINUED »