I’m airbrushed to look more white – actress
BRITISH actress Jameela Jamil has said she is disgusted by how often she is airbrushed to ‘look white’ in photoshoots.
Miss Jamil, 32, who is also a model, said airbrushing was the ‘foulest thing to happen to women in the last couple of decades’ and had had a negative impact on her mental health.
Born to an Indian father and a Pakistani mother, the star said she was told she was ‘too old, too ethnic and too fat’ to make it in Hollywood when she moved to Los Angeles in 2016. She has since risen to prominence in Netflix sitcom The Good Place, which also stars Kristen Bell and Ted Danson and returns for its third season next month.
Miss Jamil also revealed she developed anorexia as a teenager – and blamed the illness on magazines and TV programmes that over-sexualise ‘skeletal actresses’.
Speaking on the Channel 4 News podcast Ways to Change the World, she said: ‘People have made me look white in so many of the magazines and campaigns I’ve shot for.
‘That hurts me from a cultural point of view. People change my nose to make it look like a little Caucasian nose and they change the colour of my skin to make it lighter and to make me look more acceptable, perhaps, to a Caucasian audience.
‘Airbrushing and changing my ethnicity is bad for my mental health … it makes me dislike what I’m seeing in the mirror. It sends a message that I am not good enough as I am.
‘Airbrushing is one of the foulest things to happen to women in the last couple of decades.’
She later opened up about suffering from anorexia as a teenager, saying: ‘I didn’t eat a meal between the age of 14 and 17. I did not menstruate for three years because I was starving myself to fit into an ideal.’ Asked why, the former BBC Radio One presenter said: ‘It was because I was bombarded with a narrative that had no alternative. There were never any women who were celebrated for their intellect.
‘I wasn’t reading about wonderful astronauts or scientists or great musicians, I was just seeing highly sexualised pop stars who are very, very skinny on my TV, or skeletal actresses whose weight was obsessively spoken about.’
Miss Jamil’s social media campaign I Weigh aims to encourage women to be more positive about their bodies and focus more on their non-physical attributes.