When I was younger I was always insecure about the colour of my skin, even though I was light skinned, I just felt like I wasn’t light enough and my mum who had darker skin than me told me that the colour of my skin was beautiful. It wasn’t until I was 8, when I went back to Bangladesh. They sold skin lightening products there, a popular one named Fair and Lovely, which was aggressively advertised. I remember watching it on TV seeing it on billboards, it was everywhere. My grandmother had some and I had tried it, thinking it would make my skin lighter but it only broke me out and gave me a rash on my face for the entire day, it didn’t even lighten my skin. I am privileged in a sense that I have lighter skin than other South Asian women along with other backgrounds and people still treated me like I had dirty skin, so I can’t imagine what darker skinned women go through. My mother told me I was “lucky” for my skin colour, because boys will like me and I would one day get a lot of “marriage proposals” and I have seen darker skinned women get belittled and looked down on because of their skin tone.
Colourism still exists, if you don’t know what it means, it is the discrimination and prejudice between light skin and dark skin and how if you are lighter or fair skinned then you are deemed beautiful. Today, men and women are judged for the color of their skin and it is mostly the latter. Hollywood and Bollywood doesn’t help either as they always include fair skinned actors and actresses in movies and television shows. With the recent news about the live-action casting for Aladdin’s Princess Jasmine – who is revealed to be played by Naomi Scott, a fair skinned half Indian, half White woman, when Jasmine is shown to be darker and Arab shows that they prefer light skinned women over darker skinned women because it is seen as more beautiful when all skin types dark or fair is seen as youthful and desirable, people who were fair skinned were seen as upper class whereas darker skinned women are seen as unattractive and society as made it seem like it’s almost unlucky to have darker skin and the mindset of this is very toxic.
I have come across a trend that was going on that I was very passionate about called #unfairandlovely which was a trend that was filled with beautiful dark skinned women, embracing their skin. This trend influence many South Asians to feel confident and post pictures of themselves and share their stories. The trend was started by a black photographer and two Asian women and it went viral over social media. Colorism also exists in social media, platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram have filters that make your skin lighter than its original color.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BFaLrUokMdm/?taken-by=unfairandlovely_&hl=en
As a society we need to make sure that everyone of color is appreciated and represented in the right way, we can start by not being negative towards darker skin and ditch the stereotypical and demeaning comments about individuals with darker skin. Actors and Actresses in Hollywood can stop taking roles of characters that belong to different ethnicities. We need to tell everyone that whatever their skin colour is, they are still beautiful and brilliant and it should affect how we stand out in the world. Skin colour should not define the way we act and the way we work.
I’m not saying we haven’t made any progress because we have, we have started to respect different cultures and races but it doesn’t mean colorism doesn’t exist, many people do feel insecure about the colour of their skin and are shamed for it and younger girls use these skin lightening products to fit in with the standards of what people like to see.
