Who is the fairest of them all?

The lemon juice stung as I dabbed it across my face. The slight pain was oddly satisfying; almost a sign that the process of making my skin lighter was somehow happening faster because of it. I noticed the spot between my eyebrows where the remnants of a chicken pox scar lingered and dabbed the cotton pad in the lemon juice and rubbed it with force into the scar until the patch was a pinky red and stung rather uncomfortably. By this time my entire face felt rather itchy. I persevered, adding two further layers which I left to settle over an hour. The stinging became more severe and I eventually relented, washing the thin film that had formed over my face with cold water which was a welcome relief to the now warm, inflamed mess that was my skin.

I slowly opened my eyes, which were also stinging from the lemon residue, and immediately my heart sank. There was no change to my tanned brown skin tone. None whatsoever. The only difference was that I now had visible burns in all the areas that I had scrubbed forcefully to take my scars away. The scars had disappeared, giving way to patches of exposed pink flesh that started to bleed slowly and cautiously as the water calmed the stinging. My eyes filled with tears and I longed more than anything for the earth to open up and swallow me whole in that moment.

My lesson had landed immediately. I now wished for my face to return to the way it had been before I scoured it with lemon juice. Yet somehow, as luck would have it, I had ended up in an even worse state – uglier than ever, still coloured a shade of brown too dark by societal standards, but now made worse by the dotting of pink patches which would inevitably take days, if not months, to heal and leave new scars in their place.

I was annoyed at myself. Mostly because I thought of myself as intelligent, and yet my desperation to be loved and be beautiful had driven me to the ridiculous act of willingly burning my face with mild acid to make it lighter. The shallowness of it all disgusted me. I felt ashamed at myself. And then I thought back to the hopefulness I had felt during that conversation with the pretty (fair skinned) girls at school the previous week. Lemon juice was apparently all the rave – a way to make your skin and hair lighter. A way to look a bit more like the women on the glossy magazine covers from far away lands. Somewhere deep inside me, I knew it was all bullshit. But my optimism was stronger. For in that moment, I felt empowered and hopeful that I, too, could be beautiful.

And what was it that I hoped this beauty would achieve for me? A chance, perhaps, to finally be seen. To be noticed. Not by the boys. But by the aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and friends who never really saw me. The ones that claimed to love and care about me but only ever commented on how I looked to tell me I shouldn’t have spent so much time in the sun. The ones who saw me only as a ‘clever girl’. The ones who didn’t really see me at all. It wasn’t the pain of being ordinary that hurt. It was the pain of being invisible. Being relevant seems a privilege reserved only for the pretty, fair girls with long locks of beautiful light hair.

I think back on that time and hurt deeply for that teenage girl that I used to be. The world can be a difficult and cruel place. I wish I could hug her and tell her that being the clever girl helped her achieve success beyond her wildest dreams and that was a source of some very happy and wonderful memories that had nothing to do with how she looked. And while the world and the society that surrounds her might still have a bias against those with a darker skin tone, I wish I could have shown her the abundance of love and appreciation she found for her beauty from those around her – not just the beauty that lay within but also for the one that glistened from her beautiful tanned brown skin.