Priyanka Chopra has apologised for appearing in adverts for skin-lightening products, calling the campaigns one of her “most profound regrets”.
In one advert for Pond’s, which aired in India, Chopra plays a dark-skinned woman who loses her partner to a lighter-skinned woman, only to whiten her skin with the product and win him back.
The clips were recirculated on social media last year, after critics branded the actor a hypocrite for showing support for the Black Lives Matter movement despite endorsing products perpetuating colourism.
Speaking to The Guardian, Chopra said that she’d felt “sad” the first time she watched the advert. “I saw myself through my 13-year-old eyes when I was making concoctions in my bathroom trying to lighten my skin tone,” she said.
Writing in Unfinished, her autobiography released on Thursday (11 February), Chopra said that she grew up believing her skin colour made her “unattractive”.
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“I thought about how pained I’d felt when I was called kaali [a derogatory term meaning dark-skinned] as a child,” she wrote. “I was now promoting the destructive messages that had so eaten away at my sense of self-worth when I was growing up, and I knew the only person I could blame was myself.”
Chopra wrote that appearing in the campaign was a huge career misstep and “one of my most profound regrets”, adding: “I can’t go back and change what I did, but I can apologise, and I do so sincerely.
“To all the people who saw the harmful messaging that I contributed to, to all the people who still have to see commercials like these in every medium – I am deeply sorry.”
