PC, Padma Lakshmi And Other Stars Confess How The World Tried To Put Them Down For Being Dark

“Because I’m darker, I had issues as a teenager — society pressure that a girl is prettier if she’s lighter. Pressures exist, and it’s on us to make those pressures not seem important to girls. I’ve achieved what I’ve achieved, and skin colour has nothing to do with it — in fact it might have been an asset. I like the colour of my skin very much. It’s so primitive to me that people are judged on the basis of the colour of their skin. I mean, it’s skin. We all have it.”

“My skin is a map of my life. Before high school, I lived in a white suburb of Los Angeles where there were so few Indians that they didn’t even know the ‘correct’ slurs. They called me the N-word or ‘Blackie.’ For a long time I hated my skin colour. Even in India, there’s a complicated history. My grandmother discouraged us from going in the sun; she didn’t want us to be dark. We were only allowed to play outside after 4:30. There was a cosmetics line called Fair & Lovely — that says it all. [And] when I started to work as a model, people would on occasion say things to me like ‘You’re so pretty for being an Indian.’”

“I took an African-American studies class at Northwestern where we explored colourism; it was the first time I could put a name to feeling too light in the black community, too mixed in the white community. For castings, I was labelled ‘ethnically ambiguous.’ Was I Latina? Sephardic? ‘Exotic Caucasian’? Add the freckles to the mix and it created quite the conundrum.

To this day, my pet peeve is when my skin tone is changed and my freckles are airbrushed out of a photo shoot. For all my freckle-faced friends out there, I will share with you something my dad told me when I was younger: ‘A face without freckles is a night without stars.’”

“It’s important for [my daughters] to know that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes and colours, to celebrate diversity and point out people who have [a] different tone, or they’re covered in beautiful freckles, or they have tight curls or long waves. All of it’s beautiful. Girls who choose to wear boys’ clothes, who don’t want to put on a face of makeup, who want to shave their heads — that’s beautiful.”