Queer Eye’s Tan France reflects on using bleach on his skin aged nine

‘I was just a child and I felt so much pressure to be lighter,’ he said

Queer Eye star Tan France has reflected on using bleach to make his skin lighter when he was just nine years old.

The fashion designer, who is fronting a new documentary about colourism, had previously written about bleaching his skin in his 2019 autobiography Naturally Tan: A Memoir, which detailed his experience of growing up in Doncaster in the Eighties and being subject to racist abuse.

“If I went a week without being called a P-word on the street, that was really something,” France, who is British-American with Pakistani heritage, told The Guardian in a new interview. “When I was five I was chased and beaten up by a group of white men on my way to school.”

Speaking about the admission that he had tried to lighten his skin, he said: “I was just a child and I felt so much pressure to be lighter. The shame about my skin I experienced outside the house followed me home, and so I put on the cream.”

France added that colourism, which is a form of discrimination based on the shade of a person of colour’s skin tone, “is everywhere and it’s not the same as racism”.

He said: “It’s often within communities of colour themselves that people are discriminated against based on the darkness of their skin, and it has lifelong effects of internalised shame.”

Tan France fronting his new BBC Two documentary (BBC Two)

In the documentary, he confesses he used bleach on his skin again aged 16. “It wasn’t until we started filming [the documentary] and we spoke to adults who still felt this pressure that I realised I had to admit to doing it again at 16,” he said.

“I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t, but I still carry shame about it because I was old enough to understand better.”

Tan France: Beauty & the Bleach airs on BBC Two at 9pm on 27 April.