In a recent podcast, Priyanka Chopra stated that she didn’t think she was attractive because of her “dark skin” because she is from a nation “where there is massive equity on light skin.”
Actor Priyanka Chopra made her Bollywood debut with the spy-thriller, The Hero: Love Story of a Spy after winning the Miss World 2000 pageant. As confident as she seemed while answering the jury’s questions during the beauty pageant, Priyanka was not as confident during her growing-up years. Recently, the actor shared how the thought, “lighter I am, the prettier I am” was fed to her through various TV commercials she watched as a youngster.
Priyanka, during the podcast, Call Her Daddy, said being from a country “where there’s massive equity on light skin”, she didn’t think she was pretty as she had ‘dark skin’. She said, “For the longest time when I was young, I didn’t think my skin was pretty and my skin was dark. When I was in high school, I had scars. I was a tomboy. I wasn’t comfortable with how my legs looked. It wasn’t all smooth. My hair was frizzy. I was just not confident.”
Still, the actor never paid too much attention to it as she got engrossed in “fun, friends and boys” who kept her ‘distracted’. But when she joined the Indian film industry, the idea that a ‘lighter skin tone means you are beautiful’ was fed to her constantly. Later, she also endorsed the same idea in TV commercials. Priyanka expressed, “In entertainment, the narratives are set by our industry. A lot of the narratives that my younger self went through were because there were ads on TV which I also participated in later. After all, it was that normal that told me that the lighter I was the prettier I was and that narrative was set by the industry that I joined.”
Priyanka said when she joined the film industry almost two decades ago there was no conversation around these false beauty standards and it was normal for people in the film and fashion industry to ask others to be of a particular size and colour.
“When I first joined like 20 years ago, we didn’t talk about it. It was just expected that you are reed skinny, your pelvic bones show and it doesn’t matter how you get there. You should look a certain way and anything deviating from that is not pretty. People in fashion and people in films could actually ask you to be a certain body weight, they could actually tell you that you have to be able to get into this dress size and it was all normal. It still happens but behind closed doors,” Priyanka said
However, the actor wishes that ‘healthy’ conversations take place about how ‘destructive’ the beauty standards are currently and redefine beauty. She said, “At this position in my life, I cannot imagine young kids out there who subliminally or loudly have to hear it. So I think the conversation needs to be loud about like how destructive that pattern is. Who decides what is beautiful? Just like art beauty is subjective. I just think that when we talk about inclusion, we have to give room for what inclusion and beauty look like. We have to break the narratives that we set up a long time ago of what beauty is, we have to have a healthy conversation about the female and male body, and ageing and the reality of that.”
Priyanka Chopra is currently seen in the romantic drama Love Again which was released in the US theaters on May 5 and will release in India this Friday. Her web series Citadel is currently streaming on Prime Video.
