Kelly Rowland has emotionally opened up about her experiences of “constant comparison” to her fellow Destiny’s Child performers Beyoncé and Michelle Williams.
The 41-year-old Say My Name singer is a founding member of Destiny’s Child alongside 40-year-old Beyoncé and the ladies performed together from 1993 before disbanding in 2006.
Kelly sat down with Queer Eye star Tan France as part of a BBC documentary about colourism, a form of discrimination based on skin tone.
Kelly has been vocal about colourism in the past and told the Netflix reality star about how she first learned of the word.
She said she had a boyfriend whose grandmother compared her “to the colour of a paper bag” and said she was “too dark chocolate for him”, insisting he could not date her.
Kelly added: “I said what the hell. I said what does that mean?
“I came home and I talked to my mum about it and she said it's the definition of colourism.”
She continued: “It affected me in a way where I was always uncertain of how I looked. It started to define what beauty meant to me.
“In the entertainment business it manifested itself in constant comparison. When it came to my skin colour, I was hearing everything left and right - ‘she's darker, she's the darkest one in the group, she's the chocolate one’. I would always hear that.”
Tan, who opened up in the documentary about his own experiences of colourism and skin bleaching, asked Kelly if she had even tried bleaching cream, which she said she had not.
She replied: “I never thought to myself I want to do bleaching cream as much as I thought I just want to be Mariah Carey’s shade. That was who I looked up to.”
Sales of skin bleaching products net £7billion – and rising – every year.
Tan revealed in the BBC2 documentary, Tan France: Beauty & the Bleach, that some UK clinics do bleaching intravenously using liver disease drugs which have the side effect of lightening skin.
He said of the first time he bleached his skin: “When I was nine I stole my sister’s bleaching cream and did it behind a locked door. It really stung. And then it felt like really bad sunburn.
“I did it again when 16 – ashamed of my ethnicity and colour. I know now bleaching is a form of self-harm.”
Tan said he hopes his documentary will help to bust the beauty myth that white is better, after a psychotherapist diagnoses him as suffering from deep trauma from racist abuse he suffered as a child.
