'Bridgerton' actress Charithra Chandran says she experienced 'traumatizing' colorism growing up

• Charithra Chandran discussed her experiences with colorism during a recent Teen Vogue interview.
• She said she regularly received comments about being dark-skinned while visiting family in India.

Charithra Chandran opened up to Teen Vogue about experiencing colorism during her trips to India during her childhood and adolescence.

Though the "Bridgerton" star, 25, was born in Scotland and spent the majority of her teenage years in the UK, she and her parents, both of whom are Indian immigrants, spent four months out of each year with their extended family in the South Asian country.

It was during those trips that Chandran said she developed a heightened awareness of her skin tone.

"No one let me forget that I was dark-skinned growing up. My grandma was very light-skinned. Whenever we'd go around in India, they'd always say, 'Oh, you'd be pretty if you had your grandmother's coloring.' 'Shame about the color of her skin.' 'She's pretty for being dark-skinned,'" Chandran told Teen Vogue in an interview published Tuesday.

In an attempt to keep her skin from tanning, she said her grandparents allowed her to play outside only in the morning or in the evening to avoid sun exposure.

"I don't hold this against them at all, they were trying to make my life easier," the actress explained.

Chandran told the magazine that although she once attempted to wash the color off her hands when she was younger, she never used any skin-lightening creams.

According to a March 2022 report from the Zero Mercury Working Group, many of these products contain illegal and dangerous levels of mercury, which can have a skin-lightening effect. Exposure to the heavy metal can result in a rash in the short term or cause damage to vital organs with more sustained use.

In India, skin-lightening creams are labeled as "natural" products that "brighten" consumers' complexions and make them "glow," Chandran explained. From a young age, she understood these words were "synonyms for lighter."

To this day, Chandran said she's consciously working to reframe the way she was taught to view her skin tone.

"When the sun is shining and I tan, my instinct is like, 'Oh fuck, I tanned.' I'm trying to unlearn it," she told Teen Vogue.

She continued, "It's going to be a lifelong struggle. Or like when I'm editing a photo for Instagram, of course the temptations are there, because for most of my life I've been taught that that's what is beautiful. It's really, really traumatizing. I just desperately don't want that for my cousins."

In Chandran's experience, colorism from within a community can feel "more painful" than racism, she said.

"If someone's racist to you, you have your community to lean back on," Chandran explained. "But if someone's attacking you from inside your own family, or trying to oppress you, or create a hierarchy within your own family, that is in some ways, so much harder to deal with."

Chandran portrays Edwina Sharma, the diamond of London's 1814 social season, on the second season of "Bridgerton," Shondaland's inclusive Regency romance series. Netfix released the eight new episodes on March 25.

Since landing the role, the Oxford graduate has used her newfound platform to "fight and push back" against colorism.

"Being a person of color, we're not unitary, we're not one thing," she told The Telegraph in March, continuing, "There are so many different communities within that umbrella term. We should be more specific about making sure we're representing different groups of people."

She went on: "I would love to see more crew who are Black and brown. I think that's really important. We should be careful about just sort of window dressing."