Masaba Gupta has been fighting colorism and normalizing imperfect skin for ages. The fashion designer who had difficulty accepting her brown skin growing up has called out racism by people in the past.
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Recently in an interview, Masaba, who is also the daughter of actor Neena Gupta and West Indies cricketer Vivian Richards revisited her childhood and shared how she wanted to change her appearance because of bullying in school.
“I just wanted to change who I was. I wanted to be somebody else. I just didn’t like who I was,” Hindustan Times quoted her saying.
“I just decided that you know why do I have this hair or why do I have these lips or why do I have this body, why can’t I just look like everyone else and just be a part. And I didn’t want to stand out, I wanted to fit in. That was something that happened as a result of the bullying.”
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She revealed how she would use a foundation from her mom’s makeup kit to lighten the color of her skin without realizing how she looked because she kept her bathroom dark to avoid looking at her skin colour. And then she went to school in badly done makeup.
“I remember when I would step out for school around in the 8th grade. What I did was I picked up my mom’s foundation one day, I quietly went into her makeup kit and I said let me try her foundation and just make myself look lighter. I did that, and I obviously didn’t realise that it’s not the colour of my skin,” revealed the ‘Masaba Masaba’ actor.
“And I went to school, and everyone has obviously figured it out. Because I used to never put on the light in my bathroom, it would be dark because I didn’t want to look at my skin. So with the lights off, I would conceal my scars whatever I could see, and they were literally like against my dark skin, they were like white spots.”
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Masaba Gupta has also earlier accused Bollywood and the fashion industry of colorism. She and her mom are two powerful women in Bollywood who inspire us every day. You go, girl!