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Priyanka Chopra recently appeared on the Ladies First Podcast hosted by Laura Brown, and opened up about falling prey to unrealistic beauty standards in her youth. Moreover, the actress admitted to have bought into the ‘equity on lighter skin’.
Priyanka attracted significant backlash for endorsing a fairness cream few years back, but has since expressed regret about it. In the podcast, Priyanka said, “There were so many unrealistic beauty standards. Being ridiculously skinny was one, which I didn’t think about in my 20s, because I had a crazy metabolism at that point, as you do. But more than that, the equity on lighter skin in Asia, for sure. That’s something that I fell for. The fact that you have to be perfect, your face has to be perfect, your hair has to be perfect, you have to dress perfect, speak perfect, you have to have the right opinion on everything, you have to say the right thing. I think that part was the first (time) I kind of was like, ‘Forget it, I’m okay being messy sometimes, and it’s okay.”
Moreover she added that she wants to ‘unzip’ the ‘glitz and glamour’ because that’s what she feels boxed in by. Priyanka also said that in India, she had the good fortune of working with ‘incredible filmmakers’ and playing ‘a variety of characters.’ The actress also stated that she hopes she’s able to do similarly diverse work in Hollywood, as well. But she often finds herself inside a ‘shiny and glittery and pretty’ box, “I want to be a little messy.”
Meanwhile, in a Marie Claire profile earlier this year, Priyanka had said about endorsing fairness creams, “[Skin lightening] was so normalized in South Asia; it’s such a large industry that everyone was doing it. In fact, doing it is still a check [mark] when you are a female actor, but it’s awful. And it was awful for me, for a little girl who used to put talcum-powder cream on my face because I believed that dark skin was not pretty.”
Earlier during a media interaction she had told, “All my cousins are gora-chitta (fair) I was the one who turned out dusky because my dad is dusky. Just for fun, my Punjabi family would call me ‘kaali, kaali, kaali’. At 13, I wanted to put fairness creams and wanted my complexion changed.”