In 2023, there’s finally a little more dark-skin representation in what we’re seeing, streaming, and in the advertising we’re consuming. Beauty influencers are out here nurturing their melanin-rich complexions and not every single role in Hollywood is going to a light-skinned person of color. If you emotionally squint, it almost appears as if the beauty and richness of darker skin tones have been acknowledged across the board. Alas, we’ve just begun to scratch the surface — especially when it comes to colorism in South Asian communities.
In the opening scene of the new documentary “COMPLEXion,” former Miss America winner, activist and producer Nina Davuluri stands in a local shop in India observing a shelf stocked with Fair and Lovely skin-lightening creams. She’s immediately drawn back in time to a vivid memory, when she witnessed a mother buying her teenage daughter a tube of the cream. The mother’s painful words to her daughter in Telugu echo in Davuluri’s mind, uninvited: “So you don’t have the life that I have.”
The moment Davuluri was crowned Miss America in 2014, Twitter and various headlines began fixating on her skin tone. So many of us were incredulous that a woman of Indian descent with actual brown skin had been deemed a beauty queen — not because Davuluri wasn’t stunning, but because the only South Asian women the world celebrates in this way are remarkably pasty. I’m not mincing words when I say that Indian movie stars do not reflect the vast and sumptuous spectrum of brown skin tones found in India.
And so, to examine why it feels painfully impossible to shake light-skin worship, Davuluri set on a three-year journey to capture the real stories of those directly impacted by colorism, and to advocate, on a larger scale, what it means to break away from these stigmas.
Despite her iconic pageant win, Davuluri, like many women across the world, have been belittled…
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