Brown Is Beautiful

With my blood boiling and my teeth grinding, I declare,

BROWN IS BEAUTIFUL.

If you’re new to the scene of disgusting South-East Asian beauty standards, there is this gross obsession, nay, religious fanaticism over whiteness

and I do not understand why. Skin bleaching, yes BLEACHING, is a regular part of any respectable ladies’ beauty regimen, whether it be in the form of creams or laser treatments.

Can you imagine drowning in internalised racism to the point you’re literally smearing yourself in toilet cleaner? So that you can meet the arbitrary beauty standards of the very people that invaded your land, plundered your wealth and enslaved your people? So you can impress them?

A memory from my childhood that sends shivers down my spine and spins my stomach is 7-year-old me curiously going through my mothers’ bathroom cabinet. I wanted to play with makeup and paint on striking red lips or bathe in her overpriced lotion that made me smell like flowers that had names I could not yet pronounce. Only to stumble across a tube plastered with the phrase ‘Fair and Lovely.’ On it was a depressed dark-skinned woman, sullen and crusty, suddenly transforming into a radiant and glowy light-skinned babe.

I, for the first time in my short life, became aware of my melanin-rich skin. I suddenly noticed the scars that inevitably come with the adventure of childhood and that my legs were a completely different colour to my stomach. I was brown. I had brown eyes, brown skin and brown hair. I was dirty because I was not fair so I could not possibly be lovely. Lovely. I could not possibly be loved.

So, I squeezed the entire contents of the tube onto my tiny hands and lathered every part of myself I could reach. I then tucked my ‘ticket of redemption’ back away where I found it and left the bathroom with a feeling I had never before felt about myself,

Disgust.

This criminal whitewashing did not die after the colonisers left and it does not live in South-East Asia alone. It is left in the trails of the invaders, like a stubborn fungus spreading as far as it possibly can.

Only now are we seeing people of colour in Parliament and Congress.

Only now are we seeing people of all shades lead as main characters in movies and media. Not as the villains nor the quirky side characters, but the protagonists.

Only now are we celebrating melanin, chanting ‘unfair and lovely,’ and criticising the makeup brands with 6 shades of kinda-white as their entire foundation range.

Only now, after centuries of shame and self-loathing, of social rejection and isolation, of corporations profiting billions dollars of off something as celestially beautiful yet utterly irrelevant as,

The colour of ones’ skin.

Brown is beautiful. Like fertile plains of Indus Ganga to the rich and decadent cocoa grown in the heart of Brazil, brown is bountiful. Like the deep and entrancing aroma of spicy chai to the shiny and sassy beans of invigorating and electric coffee, brown is brilliant. Like the tough and wise barks of eternal oak trees, or the strong bodies of ancient warriors’ spears, brown is brave.

If only I could travel back in time to my 7-year-old self, hold her as tightly as possible, and repeat, as many times as she needed to hear,

‘I promise, you are beautiful, you are bountiful, you are brilliant and you are brave.

And I promise, brown is bountiful, brown is brilliant, brown is brave and my god,

Brown is so beautiful.’