What does the shade “nude” mean in today’s diverse landscape? Science journalist and author Angela Saini looks back at her own life between India and London to decode the varying notions of the colour “nude”
I remember moving to Delhi from my home in London about 15 years ago. I had been offered my first job as a reporter for a current affairs magazine, and my to-do list included finding somewhere to live. Before viewing one dismal apartment after another, I stood in a dank corridor while my middle-aged lettings agent filled in my rental form. Name, age, occupation, he asked—and then, skin colour.
I’d never been asked this question before. Having grown up in Britain, I’d never queried my colour. I was obviously brown. What else did he want me to say? I was brown. Why was that box even on the form, I wondered. Look at me, I thought in genuine confusion. “Brown,” I told him, furrowing my brows. “B-R-O-W-N.”
This stalemate continued for a while, him asking me my skin colour and me staring at him in utter perplexity, until it finally dawned on me. I wasn’t brown anymore. “What colour am I?” Now, outside the door of an upmarket South Delhi guestroom that I could scarcely afford, in this country in which almost everyone was brown, I learned that I was “wheatish.” I was the golden shade of a field of food, the colour of ripe wheat. Skin colour takes on a fresh palette of labels when every degree of pigmentation matters.
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