Priyanka Chopra recalled how she wasn’t confident about her looks during her growing-up years.
After winning the Miss World crown in 2000, Priyanka Chopra stepped into the film industry with Thalapathy Vijay starrer Thamizhan and since then, she has been conquering hearts across the globe with her confidence and impressive performances.
However, things were a little different during Priyanka’s growing-up years. In one of the latest podcast, ‘Call Her Daddy’, the Bajirao Mastani admitted that being from a country where ‘there’s massive equity on light skin’, the actress believed that she wasn’t pretty enough because of her dark skin while she was growing up.
Priyanka shared that when she was in high school, she had scars and was a tomboy. The actress recalled, “I wasn’t comfortable with how my legs looked. It wasn’t all smooth. My hair was frizzy. I was just not confident.” However, she never paid much attention to it as she got engrossed in “fun, friends and boys” who kept her ‘distracted’.
However, when she joined the film industry, she was constantly fed with the idea that a ‘lighter skin tone means you are beautiful.’
“In entertainment, the narratives are set by our industry. A lot of the narratives that my younger self went through were because there were ads on TV which I also participated in later. After all, it was that normal that told me that the lighter I was the prettier I was and that narrative was set by the industry that I joined,” PeeCee said in the podcast.
Speaking about how it was normal for people in the film and fashion industry to ask others to be of a particular size and colour, she continued, “When I first joined like 20 years ago, we didn’t talk about it. It was just expected that you are reed skinny, your pelvic bones show and it doesn’t matter how you get there. You should look a certain way and anything deviating from that is not pretty. People in fashion and people in films could actually ask you to be a certain body weight, they could actually tell you that you have to be able to get into this dress size and it was all normal. It still happens but behind closed doors.”
Priyanka went on to emphasize on the importance of healthy conversations on how ‘destructive’ the beauty standards are currently and redefine beauty and added, “At this position in my life, I cannot imagine young kids out there who subliminally or loudly have to hear it. So I think the conversation needs to be loud about like how destructive that pattern is. Who decides what is beautiful? Just like art beauty is subjective. I just think that when we talk about inclusion, we have to give room for what inclusion and beauty look like. We have to break the narratives that we set up a long time ago of what beauty is, we have to have a healthy conversation about the female and male body, and ageing and the reality of that.”
Workwise, Priyanka’s web series, Citadel is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
