How I Learned To Finally Love My Brown Skin

Being obsessed with fair skin is something that comes easy to us Indians and I was no exception. I had always felt like an anomaly in my own family, and it did not help that my grandmother would often emphasize how different I looked compared to everyone else in the family. She would often ruminate about my skin color over the evening teas. It never bothered me that I was the shortest one in my family. However, the comment about my complexion, my dark olive skin was like a dagger in my heart. You see, that implied that I wasn’t pretty like my mother. Growing up, all I wanted to do, was look like my mother. She was the epitome of beauty for me. This color difference made it difficult for me to claim any lineage from my mother and for the same reason, was indigestible to me.

When My Skin Color Became My Identity

However, it wasn’t until much later that I started equating brown skin with ugliness. To add to that, puberty was a hurricane which took me by surprise. Along with the usual problems of adolescence, I also had to deal with the issues of low self-esteem and self-doubt. I felt like all the world had turned against me. Not only was I short and stout, I wasn’t even fair-skinned. I felt like my brown skin was an advertisement of my ugliness. While everyone was busy having crushes, I was busy asking myself who would even have a crush on me.

I definitely had no models to look up to. Sure enough, every heroine in all the movies that I saw had the peaches and cream complexion. The models in the ads splashed across the newspaper were all fair-skinned. Certainly, an attractive brown-skinned woman was an alien concept to me and the world alike. No wonder my brown skin became synonymous with ugliness. I would often hear descriptions of girls in my school gang where they were being described in terms of how gori or kaali they were. Every mention of the word kaali elicited a reaction of disgust by the speaker and met with the approval from the listeners.

And like a second nature, I internalized this emotion of shame and disgust.

Looking For A Solution

By the time I made my foray into the adult world, I had actively begun searching for ways to lighten my skin. I tried everything, from using home remedies to weekly parlor visits to bleaching my skin at home. Fairness creams became a staple in my beauty kit. I felt extremely jealous of my fair-skinned cousins who did not have to put in so much effort. I would avoid going to parties and family events where my complexion would often come up as a topic of discussion. Most of my free time was spent researching the latest advancements in the field of skin care, desperately looking for any way out. In all of this, I never realized there was anything wrong with the way I thought.

All this changed when I attended a talk by a famous feminist in our college. She pointed out the problem and it was so plain, I wondered why I never saw it. She pointed out the simple fact that skin color was a fact of biology and it was only the media which had started this association between fair skin and beauty. It felt like I was struck by a lightning. I realized I was so hateful towards myself over something that was beyond my control.

Accepting And Loving Myself

Thereafter, I stopped using all the products that I used to lighten my skin. I started reading up online about colorism, and social movements that focussed on it. I realized that a whole section of our society has been looked down upon for their skin color and they couldn’t even fight it. The overwhelming presence of fair-skinned women in media made them (and even me) believe that fair indeed was beautiful. The more I read, the more liberated I became. Nobody ever mentioned the fact to me that Draupadi, the famous mythological queen, was dark-skinned, just like me! This was a woman, who was famed in our mythology for her beauty. It was Draupadi’s beauty that actually formed the basic plotline of Mahabharat.

This knowledge highlighted the fact for me that beauty wasn’t limited to skin color.

It took a lot of courage, and it was a long journey, but I finally learned to love myself for who I was, dark skin and all. I realized that as far as functionality goes, my skin was in its healthiest best condition, after all, it did its duty of protecting my organs perfectly. And as far as beauty goes, it came in all shapes, colors, and sizes. It was my mindset which did not allow me to love my beautiful, brown skin but I promised myself, rather than believing the world I would believe in myself. And this was how I finally learned to love the skin I was in, in all its brown-hued beauty.

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