Vaseline's homepage asks: "Do you see your skin the way we do? Your skin is amazing."

Well, it's clearly not so amazing if you're brown. Vaseline, a sub-brand of Unilever, has just launched a Facebook app in India that allows users to whiten their profile pictures. The app, which is designed to promote Vaseline's range of skin-lightening creams for men, promises to "transform your face on Facebook with Vaseline Men" in a campaign fronted by Bollywood actor Shahid Kapur. According to Pankaj Parihar of Omnicom, the global communications group behind the campaign, "the response has been pretty phenomenal".

The fact that the response has been "phenomenal" is sad but not surprising. While it might be hard for the tanorexics among us to understand, skin lightening is a huge, and extremely lucrative, industry. According to a report by Global Industry Analysts, it is predicted to reach $10bn by 2015.

And while skin-lightening products have traditionally been targeted at women, the beauty industry is growing increasingly excited about the financial rewards to be had by drumming up a bit of self-loathing in men. It's expected that sales of male skin-lightening products could reach similar levels of value sales as their female-targeted counterparts within five to 10 years. But men aren't the only demographic on the marketeers' strategic horizons: children are also fair game. An Indian Readership Survey in 2008 found that 12 to 14-year-olds accounted for 13% of the market.

It makes for pretty sickening reading. But what makes it even more nauseating is the fact that Vaseline is a sub-brand of Unilever, which also own brands like Dove. Dove, if you remember, set about saving our little girls from the beauty industry with their Campaign for Real Beauty. The much lauded campaign included inspirational films like Onslaught, which suggested "you talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does".

Hypocrisy is nothing new with Unilever. While Dove's multimillion-pound campaigns shunned stereotypes of women, Lynx (another Unilever brand) turned stereotyping women into something of an art form. In 2007, film-maker Rye Clifton created a mashup of Unilever's Axe (Lynx) and Dove communications, which juxtaposed the different messages the two Unilever brands were putting into the market with disturbing effect. Apologists made the excuse that Dove and Axe are very different entities with different targets, different voices and, so, different values.

Here's where I should probably fess up: I am, or was, one of those apologists. I work in advertising and in my last agency spent many, many hours toiling over the Dove campaigns. I genuinely believe that Dove is a great brand that practices what it preaches: it uses "real women" in its ads and has a very strict policy about retouching. I was proud to work on their projects and think the feeling was shared among everyone on the team.

While nobody goes into advertising for the good of humanity, we tend to sleep better at night when not doing anything that's too obviously evil. But people get sucked into the day-to-day of their brand work and, when working for a global conglomerate like Unilever, rarely stop to consider the bigger picture. Nor do consumers: 160 million times a day, someone somewhere chooses a Unilever product. They rarely stop to think that the Marmite, the Domestos and the Dove in their shopping basket are all owned by the same people.

But in an era of increasing transparency, parent companies like Unilever can't hide behind a barrage of sub-brands anymore. They can't promote skin-lightening in India and self-esteem in England and expect to retain any credibility when it comes to their corporate brand. Perhaps we should welcome Unilever's latest foray into social media. While it's all too easy to shut our eyes to what multinationals are up to when it's not on our home turf, everything they do on the internet is only a click away. So vote with your tweets, start blogging, start boycotting and start asking Unilever to stop its campaign for whiter beauty. Only then might marketing people start listening.