Brown Girl vs her skin

What is beauty?

It is described in the Cambridge dictionary as the quality of being pleasing and attractive.

Beauty is from the eyes of the beholder, I remember when I was 4 years old and beauty in my eyes then was white, tall and slender. In the media they had about 95% of attractive white male and female models selling perfumes, shampoos and lingerie.

This was how much the media was telling me directly what beauty was. There was only 5% of ethnic minorities I saw on billboards and adverts.

Back then it was difficult the only thing that came close or you expected to see representation was tall models with brunette hair. 

I know that even though we have Bollywood full of brown actors, these big time celebrities are still selling whitening creams. It’s the fact that we are told by our brown counterparts that lighter skin is beautiful.

Need I say more that even in our Asian culture we’re made fun of if our skin is darker, I was called “kali” because I was darker than my mother. This name calling and “jokes” gave me a negative imagery of myself.

This affected my ability to see my own beauty, growing up  and being in a predominantly white group of friends was difficult, I always compared myself and saw my white friends as being prettier. Why did the media perceive ethnic girls as being less pretty than their white counterparts?

Even now in dating shows for example most of the seasons in the UK Love Island series always chose contestants who preferences were white women. It was always black or brown girls that were the last pick, or the male contestants type were “brown hair girls”.

When I went on dates, some of the guys would out of the blue “reassure me” and tell me they’re not into white girls- which was firstly very weird to even tell me that and other females are not my competition. The other time was that they said they never dated a brown girl before- I hate this, we’re not Pokémon to collect and nor are we an experiment.

Sometimes I still feel like this- that me a brown girl is second option, loving your identity your race is an ongoing journey. We still need to remember that our brown smooth skin is beautiful.