When Tan France was nine, he stole his cousin’s skin bleaching cream. It stung, like sunburn, so he didn’t use it for long. But when he was older, in his mid-teens, he decided to have another go.
The shame and guilt that Queer Eye’s resident fashion expert feels about his youthful pursuit of lighter skin is the ostensible motive behind Tan France: Beauty and the Bleach (BBC Two), a celebrity-odyssey documentary that starts, as is now custom, with the obligatory suitcase-packing shot. The Doncaster-raised stylist is leaving his deluxe Utah home and returning to “musty-fusty” old England, to reckon with his feelings about skin bleaching and investigate the wider problem of colourism: the idea that fairer complexions are favoured in black and Asian communities, as well as society at large. Yet France’s journeys – literal and metaphorical – turn out to be far from straightforward.
