‘Queer Eye’ Star Tan France Says He Bleached His Skin As A Little Boy
Tan France got super personal in his new memoir, Naturally Tan.
The beloved star of Netflix’s Queer Eye, and son of Pakistani immigrants, revealed that when he was 10 years old, he stole bleaching cream from his cousin and tried to lighten his skin.
“The importance of being pale is very bizarre. The people around me certainly didn’t intend to pass on this belief, but I was aware of it and affected by it just the same,” he wrote. “When I was five, I remember thinking, ‘God, I’d give anything to be white. I just want to be white, I want to be white, I want to be white.’ I had been so conditioned to think that if you were white, you were automatically more attractive.”
He never told his cousin that he stole her bleaching cream.
“I haven’t had the balls to tell her I took it, because, since then, I’ve been ashamed of the fact that I succumbed to the pressure,” he added. “I kept the dirty little secret to myself. I’d only use it at night, before bed, when no one else was going to catch me. Let me tell you, that s–t hurt.”
Tan also speaks about growing up as a South Asian person in England, and the racism that followed.
“I had another dream as a kid, which angers me now,” he writes. “But I’ve talked to many friends of color who have told me they shared the same dream, and that is to wake up white. I first had that dream when I was very, very young, because I worried constantly that if I went outside the house, bad things would happen to me.”
“If you ask me what my favorite thing about my appearance is, I’ll say my skin,” he says now. “I think my skin color is beautiful. As a 10-year-old, I could never have imagined that you could find my skin color beautiful, and I’m willing to bet most nonwhite people have thought the same thing.”
YAS TAN!