When I was little, I wanted to look like Jasmine. I thought she was by far the prettiest Disney princess with her flowing black tresses, dark skin, huge brown almond eyes, curvaceous figure - and she got to wear a pretty sexy ensemble. Normally a very sharing child, I would sometimes hide the coveted Jasmine Barbie when friends came by to protect her from being damaged. Later, my sister and I would reenact the scenes from the movie with our now headless Ken (since Cory had thrown it out the window).
Of course, out of all the Disney princesses, she looked the least like me. I was reminded of this painful reality every year on the first warm day when everyone busted out their shorts, and my skinny little stick white legs were the scorn of so many jokes. Rather than bronze my body, the summer sun brought out the freckles across the bridge of my nose. And it did nothing for the rest of me. It got worse as I got older and more conscious of how much I didn’t look like society’s expectations of a golden goddess, especially once I started working as a lifeguard. I remember one patron coming up to me and joking, “must be your first day here, huh? You need a tan!”
[Actually, a-hole, I’ve been working since April. I’m on the swim team, I teach lessons, and I’m here all the time because I’m the head lifeguard. And I once got somebody arrested for diving in the shallow end. (True story.) Do you really want to continue this conversation?]
So it figures that I would eventually end up in India, surrounded by millions of women who look much like Jasmine. I don’t believe a more beautiful population exists in all the earth. Even women living in the depths of poverty looked to me like they could step off the cover of a magazine. I, on the other hand, had sweat pimples, flat hair, glow-in-the-dark skin, and constant wardrobe malfunctions (Indian women never get dirty or flash people on accident, but I did both of those things with frequency). If I had never felt very pretty before, this just amplified every insecurity l had ever experienced.
But in a bizarre twist of irony, my fair skin was highly valued and noticed in Indian society. I was stared at everywhere I went, and sometimes a lot more than stared at. It didn’t make me feel beautiful, just uncomfortable and even more irritated that I couldn’t fit in the community I so badly wanted to be a part of.
And then, I was blessed with one of those iconic moments that define the rest of your life. I was shopping for bangles to take home as presents; the girl at the shop – she looked about my age – took my arm and said, you have such beautiful skin. Taken aback, I looked at her more intently and realized that here in front of me was the spitting image of Jasmine, and she was even lovelier in person. So I told her that I had actually always wanted to have smooth dark skin and eyes like her own. No no no, she replied, I am so ugly. Too dark, so ugly.
It didn’t make me feel beautiful, just sad and disturbed by the colonization and multi-billion dollar tanning industry that had led to this very moment.
Both of us had been told by our native lands that we were not beautiful, that we were made the entirely wrong color altogether. We had been offered products to reverse the mistake from billboards high above, looking down on our inferior complexions. When these did not work, we took to self-loathing.
For so long I had wanted to be her, and when we finally met, it turned out that she had always wanted to be me.
