“Queer Eye” fashion expert Tan France is the ultimate advocate for confidence and self-love, but he wasn’t always so assured in the skin he was in.
In his brand-new memoir, “Naturally Tan,” the Netflix star – who grew up in England as the child of Pakistani immigrants – revealed that he was insecure about his dark complexion as a young boy and went to extreme lengths in an attempt to change it.
“When I was ten years old, I used to bleach my skin,” he writes, per People. “I actually stole the cream from one of my cousins who used it often. To this day, 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.”
Tan called the importance of being pale, which he began to feel at only age 5, “very bizarre.”
“I remember thinking, ‘God, I’d give anything to be white. I just want to be white, I just want to be white,'” he writes. “I had been so conditioned to think that if you were white, you were automatically more attractive.”
The style guru confessed that in addition to conditioning from the outside world, he was also influenced by comments from within his own family.
“One of my best friends in the UK is [Bengali] and has beautiful dark skin,” he writes. “One of my family members saw us together and said, ‘That’s fine if that’s just his friend, but she’d better not be his girlfriend, because they might have dark children.'”
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When Tan began bleaching his skin at age 10, he kept it a secret from those closest to him.
“No one else knew I was using it,” he writes. “I didn’t want family to know, as they were so sweet and accepting that I knew they would have stopped me because they thought I didn’t need it. I kept the dirty little secret to myself. I’d only use it at night, before bed, when no one was going to catch me.”
Now, decades later, Tan has long given up skin-bleaching and developed a deep love for the feature he once tried to shed.
“Thankfully, I matured, and the bleaching wasn’t something I wanted to sustain,” he writes. “Now, if you ask me what my favorite thing about my appearance is, I’ll say my skin. I think my skin color is beautiful.”
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