PREM'S TRUTH
Tell me about yourself.
Prem: Growing up, throughout high school and middle school I was always the only women of color. It was only until I got to university that there were a few others. It was very hard to connect with people who had similar experiences as me. When I was around 27 after living in Ireland for 25 years, I moved to Toronto which was a total breath of fresh air because it was a metropolitan city, after that I moved to Vancouver. In terms of passions I am from Monday thru Friday during the day I am a marketing operations manager but I really love being creative and thinking out of the box. Looking at numbers and data is my day to day job but in the evenings my true passion is painting women, especially women of color and painting them as goddesses totally in their element. I do have other passions but this is something I can do all day where you forget to drink and eat.
What your definition of beauty.
Prem: Beauty to me is having confidence and being confident within yourself. You don't need to have fancy clothes or wear shape wear you, don't need to have a particular type of eyebrows, it has nothing to do with the outside. Someone who doesn't fit the conventional terms of beauty but because they are such a beautiful person on the inside and they have this confidence with ever step they walk with on this earth that is beauty to me.
What are your beauty struggles?
Prem: The struggle that I had growing up in Ireland is I remember looking for foundations and using the darkest shade in the store, putting it on my face which I thought looked fine until someone took a flash photograph and I could see my face was pasty white and my neck was brown. I ended up depending on my natural skin because I couldn’t find anything that matched. I had really bad acne when I was about 24, it was terrible cystic acne and I had to go to the office to work. I was really embarrassed and ashamed of it and having to find something that matched. I remember spending around 200 euros on buying different foundations that were oil free. I was mixing them altogether to find a match, I felt like a witch mixing all of them together. Another thing I dealt with and continue to deal with especially growing up in the 90’s is body shape. The shape that was dominant in the media was super stick thin, thankfully curves are now in and if you have curves you are considered blessed. I have always wondered by looking into the history of womens’ beauty, I wonder what the hell happened !?! Being of Indian descend a lot of women are pear shaped so there was a lot of dieting and dieting trying to get to that western cliche. It was only until this year it no longer was 1999 anymore. It’s time for women to accept that whatever the media markets advertise are all lies being projected to us. Reality is something total different. You celebrate who you are. That is what beauty is, it took me a life time to figure that out. Your blessed to have a fully functioning body. I've been thru the pressure and I wouldn't want anybody else going thru the same pressure I went thru, mostly at my own fault too.
As a W.O.C. what do you want the beauty industry to know?
Prem: If I could go to Vogue, I would tell them to stop sexualizing women in their photographs and stop using women who are above 5’10, weigh a certain weight and measure a certain way and select women from a random pool and use those as real women to show young girls that are reading these magazines that this is what its all about. There are some brands that are doing it but its not enough. I think its 60 years of damage on women and its going to take big name brands and magazines.
What makes you feel unstoppable?
Prem: What makes me feel unstoppable is knowing that I have survived 30 years of false adversing telling me how I need to act, look and talk a certain way, and finally thinking this is enough I am who I am and I am beyond whatever a marketing company is telling me to be and they can go…you know.
What is your favorite song?
Prem: Earth Groove- Vijay & Sofia