Hello, welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Luke Jones, and this time in BBC OS Conversations, we're bringing people together to share their experiences of a form of racism called colourism.

We decided to discuss colourism after the recent BBC news story about a Nigerian woman who bleached the skin of her

six young children. She bought these skin whitening creams from a local supermarket and they

left her children with discoloured skin, burns and scars.

She said she did it after pressure from her family.

They preferred her sister's fair-skinned children.

But this wasn't some isolated incident.

According to the World Health Organisation,

more than three out of four women in Nigeria regularly use skin whitening products.

Lighter skin is associated by many with prosperity, success and beauty.

And in India, a high-ranking government official recently shared on social media discriminatory

comments she overheard about her skin tone.

Later, we'll hear from Chandana, who has faced colourism from an early age.

I was six or seven years old when I would first hear these conversations of my relatives

saying that, oh, she's a dark-skinned girl.

And they would say this to my parents that you would have to pay a lot more dowry to get her married.

And it will be such a struggle to find a husband for her.

In our first conversation, we hear from two women who work in the fashion and beauty industry,

where appearance is everything. Até Joule is a beauty journalist in London, who has also developed

her own range of beauty products for all skin tones. And first, Nyakim Gatwech, a model known as Queen of the Dark, after her naturally dark skin

colour. She was born in South Sudan and moved to the US in 2007.

It took me so a while to figure out what's the definition of colourism.

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