Priyanka Chopra Says She Regrets Endorsing Fairness Creams

The actor said her skin colour had made her feel insecure in her younger days.

Actor Priyanka Chopra has said she regrets promoting skin whitening creams earlier on in her career. Speaking to Marie Claire about her upcoming memoir Unfinished, the actor recalled how her own insecurities about the colour of her skin stemmed from how she was treated by film industry influencers and the media.

"[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,” she told the publication. "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," she added.

In a 2017 interview with Vogue, Priyanka recalled how she was very conscious of the colour of her skin when she was younger because she was constantly told women who were fair were prettier. "When I was an actor, around my early twenties, I did a commercial for a skin-lightening cream. I was playing that girl with insecurities. And when I saw it, I was like, "Oh s***. What did I do?" she said.

In June last year, several Bollywood celebrities, including Priyanka, were called out for claiming to support the Black Lives Matter movement and condemning racism while having endorsed fairness creams.

Priyanka's latest film The White Tiger released on Netflix on 22 January. Directed by Ramin Bahrani, the film is an adaptation of Aarvind Adiga's 2008 Booker Prize-winning novel of the same name and also stars Rajkummar Rao and Adarsh Gourav.