MAM
Pond’s launches ‘Sun Portraits’ campaign using UV-sensitive Rajasthani art
Skincare brand turns traditional Phad paintings into living reminders of sun damage in Phalodi, Rajasthan.
MUMBAI: Pond’s has painted a striking new picture of sun protection, one that literally fades before your eyes. The leading skincare brand has unveiled ‘Sun Portraits’, a powerful campaign set in Phalodi, Rajasthan, where summer temperatures regularly soar to 51°C. In collaboration with local Phad artists, Pond’s commissioned life-size portraits of women from the region, painted directly onto the walls of their own homes using UV-sensitive paint.
As the harsh desert sun beats down day after day, the portraits visibly deteriorate fading, blemishing, and discolouring in real time mirroring the damaging effects of prolonged UV exposure on human skin. The evolving artwork serves as a daily, tangible reminder that sun protection is not optional.
Rather than relying on statistics or conventional advertising, the campaign embeds its message into something deeply personal and cultural: the women’s homes, their art, and their everyday routines. This community-driven approach transforms awareness into lived experience.
Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) vice president for Skincare Pratik Ved said, “Sun Portraits is a reflection of our belief that true impact lies not in telling people what to do, but in helping them experience why it matters. By transforming an invisible risk into a visible and evolving piece of art within their own homes, we’ve made sun protection both personal and immediate.”
Ogilvy senior executive creative director & creative head for beauty & luxury (West) Tanuja Bhat added, “In heartland India, narratives are etched in culture, art and tradition. We decided to use that language to create Sun Portraits, an awareness campaign that brings out the sun’s impact on skin in a simple yet powerful way.”
The campaign arrives at a time when purpose-driven creativity is gaining ground in Indian advertising. By blending cultural relevance with a strong human insight, Pond’s has created more than just an ad, it has turned homes into living canvases that quietly urge women to protect their skin every single day.
In the scorching heat of Rajasthan, Pond’s has found a brilliant way to make an invisible enemy visible proving that sometimes the most effective skincare message isn’t spoken, but slowly painted by the sun itself.
Brands
Google secures AP discom licence to power $15bn Vizag AI hub
First-of-its-kind move gives tech giant grid control for massive 1GW campus
VISAKHAPATNAM: Google has secured a rare electricity distribution company licence in Andhra Pradesh, marking a decisive shift from being just a power consumer to becoming a power distributor for its upcoming mega data centre hub in Visakhapatnam.
The move effectively rewrites the rulebook for hyperscalers in India. Instead of relying on state utilities, Google will be able to procure electricity directly from generators, including its own renewable sources. This not only cuts out intermediaries but also gives the company tighter control over supply, reliability and long-term costs.
For a business where electricity can account for up to 60 per cent of operating expenses, the economics are hard to ignore. Even more critical is uptime. Data centres demand near-perfect reliability, and owning the distribution layer allows Google to manage outages and load balancing with far greater precision.
At the heart of the plan is a sprawling 1-gigawatt data centre ecosystem spread across more than 600 acres in three locations near Vizag. With an estimated investment of $15 billion over five years, the project is set to become India’s largest single foreign direct investment and Google’s biggest AI-focused facility outside the United States.
The campus is being designed with artificial intelligence workloads in mind, housing the company’s custom tensor processing units to power services such as Gemini, Search and Google Cloud. In scale, the planned capacity is comparable to powering a small city.
Google is not building alone. It has partnered with Adani Infrastructure to develop the physical campuses, while Bharti Airtel will set up an international subsea cable landing station. This connectivity backbone is expected to link the hub directly to a dozen countries, ensuring low latency for global data traffic.
Vizag’s coastal location plays a key role in that strategy. It enables direct access to subsea cables and provides the large volumes of water needed for cooling data centre operations. Equally important is policy backing from the Government of Andhra Pradesh, which fast-tracked approvals and granted the uncommon discom licence to anchor the investment.
Groundbreaking is scheduled for April 28, 2026, with phased commissioning expected to begin by July 2028.
The broader signal is clear. As AI workloads surge, hyperscalers are no longer content plugging into existing infrastructure. They are beginning to build and control it. In Vizag, Google is not just setting up a data centre, it is wiring up its own future.
