The Struggle with Appearance as a Southeast Asian Girl

My name is Farihah Chowdhury, and I am proud to be a Bangladeshi-American. But sometimes, being a part of the “brown” community can be mentally taxing. I’ve grown up watching Bollywood movies, filled with perfect women with perfect bodies. The movies showed that only women with these bodies would get what she wanted or make men swoon. All of the actresses are light-skinned, even sometimes featuring people who weren’t even from the Southeast Asia region. These women are absolutely beautiful, and there is no denying that. However, all of the little girls who watched these movies have gotten this image of the “perfect” or “desirable” body that they have to look like when they get older. Dark-skinned desi girls don’t ever see anyone like them in the movies, and start to wonder why they are different, or considered “uglier” than the lighter-skinned girls. The Bollywood industry has even promoted skin lightening products, showing the transformation as beautifying! The industry has pushed desi girls to believe that they are not beautiful unless they look like actresses like Aishwarya Rai or Deepika Padukone, making them go to extreme measures of changing their appearance and hiding their own beauty.

As a child, my older relatives would always tell me to not play in the sun too much, or else I would get “too dark.” I was pushed to use the product “Fair and Lovely,” which claimed to brighten your skin up to five shades with continuous use. I gained weight, and always compared myself to the beautiful actresses, feeling helpless and insecure. But as I matured and got older, I realized that my body and my skin tone are beautiful too and that I should embrace my own beauty instead of trying to obtain an image that was impossible to become. Today, Hollywood is starting to feature more dark-skinned desi girls, and I hope that Bollywood follows suit.