Nelly Furtado has claimed magazine editors used to her “lighten her skin” in her photoshoots in the early 2000s.
The Maneater singer, who has Portuguese parents, claimed to People that her photos were subjected to “a lot of airbrushing” at the start of her career and editors would change the colour of her skin and the position of her hips.
“I have olive skin, and they’d kind of lighten my skin a lot in photos, and kind of take my hips down all the time – they would always kind of cut off in editorials,” the Canadian star told People.
The I’m Like a Bird singer addressed the experience on her 2003 song Powerless (Say What You Want), in which she sings, “Paint my face in your magazines / Make it look whiter than it seems / Paint me over with your dreams / Shove away my ethnicity.”
Nelly added that she was “kind of angry about it” by the time she came to write her second album Folklore, on which Powerless appeared.
The Promiscuous hitmaker also recalled that she used to bring her own clothes to photoshoots in case she didn’t like the looks stylists came up with.
“I was pretty feisty, so I really knew what I wanted,” she explained. “For instance, let’s say a photoshoot or something, I’d always bring my own little carry-on with my own little raver pants and tank tops and glitter, just in case I didn’t like what the stylist brought to the shoot, just to make sure I was comfortable, and just blazing my own trail I guess, in my own way. You have to, I think. You have to kind of have that sense of self.”
Nelly released her seventh studio album, 7, earlier this month.
