Under My Skin

The concept of being beautiful has always been difficult for me. Growing up, all I could see was the colour of my skin. Dark. Not beautiful... just dark. Surrounded by fair-skinned children, I was an anomaly.

Outside of school, I was bombarded with images of women in the media – beautiful women who looked nothing like me. I made collages of my favourite celebrities, idolizing their beauty and wishing I could look like them. Golden hair, bright coloured eyes, rose lips—I wanted nothing more than to be somebody other than myself. As I grew older, I told myself that I didn’t care. But the hatred of my skin, and ultimately myself, manifested through the rejection of my culture. I was ashamed to wear South Asian clothes in public, frustrated with the Sri Lankan food in my household, and embarrassed by the classical Indian dance classes my parents had enrolled me in. Why couldn’t I just be normal like everyone else? Why did I have to be the different one?

I once asked my older brother if he had ever felt the same way as I did growing up, if he had ever felt like he was different or not good enough. He hadn’t. He had never felt the pressure to conform to a certain ideal. Nobody had ever made Indian jokes about him in middle school or made him cry in class. Prepubescent boys hadn’t told him how brown people smelled like curry, or how his family worshipped goats. Nobody had ever compared his thick, black, curly hair to pubes, or stated that he was a terrorist. Of course, these statements were all “jokes” and, to be fair, I probably laughed the first few times I heard them. When you laugh along you can almost pretend it’s not offensive; people aren’t laughing at you, but with you. But, after a while, it gets harder to pretend and it’s no longer funny. People often say things without fully understanding the implications of their words. They don’t realize that little careless comments or gestures can change the way someone views themselves, their beauty, or their self-worth.

“You’re really pretty for a brown girl.” I’ve heard it many times. The compliment that’s not really a compliment. Every time, it’s said with the best intentions, and every time, it gets a little bit more painful. I’m attractive. For a brown girl. For a Sri Lankan girl. For a Tamil girl. But not for a regular girl? The colour of my skin separates me from everyone else. I’m in my own category and I don’t qualify for the overall round. The first time I heard that sentence, I was flattered. But as I grew older, the connotations sunk in and I fully understood what it meant. When they say that I’m “really pretty for a brown girl,” it means that my heritage, my culture, my race is not typically beautiful. I’m an exception, and I should feel flattered because someone has decided that I am lucky enough to be attractive for a brown girl. Don’t get me wrong, I know that I am attractive. Beautiful even, as vain as that may sound. I won’t pretend that I haven’t looked in a mirror and I won’t pretend that I have not been validated. But knowing something is not the same as believing something. Society has taught me that dark is not beautiful, just like it has taught others that dark is not beautiful. As a woman, the media has taught me that my happiness and self-worth is contingent on my physical beauty. And I know that I am not alone. My experiences are shared by so many others struggling to love themselves—relegated to the colour of their skin, regardless of the colour of their skin.

The desire to write this piece came to me at a point in my life where I was struggling to equate who I knew myself to be with who I thought I was. Standing at a crossroad—at the end of my undergraduate studies but the beginning stages of my future, I reflected on the past twenty years of my life through my law school applications. I spoke about my experiences as an ethnic minority growing up in a predominantly Caucasian upper-middle class neighbourhood. I attributed my successes and relationships with others to my ability to understand and appreciate different perspectives and outlooks on life. But the contradictions within myself were glaringly obvious. How could I perceive myself as a confident and sociable individual when I knew that I possessed so much self-doubt and dislike for most aspects of myself?

“You’re pretty for a Brown girl.”

“You’re pretty for a Middle Eastern girl.”

“You’re pretty for an Asian girl.”

“You’re pretty for a Black girl.”

That’s just it. You’re pretty, but never pretty enough.

By Aiishwariya Haran | Photography by Jeremy Marasigan