"Beauty is a Social Construct"

WHITE being considered the ideal of beauty for women, especially in India, is part of a cruel dynamic. White is not a skin colour, whiteness is a social construct. Ancient Greek statues are often assumed to represent idealised white, 'natural' beauty. This is a projection of modern biases. Scientific advances reveal its original appearance: a woman with an olive or light brown complexion and heavily made-up, her hair, possibly Afro-textured.

- Angélica Dass

The idea that light skin is more beautiful than dark skin is the consequence of colonisation and racist Western beauty norms in many contexts. Mainly, all preferences for light skin have their roots in colonisation. We have to acknowledge how categorisations of racialised beauty have been a tool of colonial violence. My internationally acclaimed photo project, Humanae, rejects a singular understanding of race through skin colour, and highlights how whiteness is also manifested in the pursuit of beauty in relation to facial features. Colonialism has often used the idea of beauty to disguise racial fetishisation, scientific racism and ethnographic profiling.

Beauty is a social construct that functions in a dynamic of comparison with "the other". This search throughout our history tries to reach an ideal that is impossible, and women mostly suffer from this pressure. To grow old becomes a process of deterioration and to be beautiful is to try to reach the impossible. The objective of my work is to generate conversations where we can celebrate that we all have beauty.