Nelly Furtado Says Magazines Would ‘Lighten’ Her ‘Olive Skin’ in the Early 2000s

Nelly Furtado is reflecting back on some of the more toxic aspects of the entertainment industry.

The star sat down with People recently, where she recalled “a lot of airbrushing,” during the early 2000s, when she released hits like “I’m Like a Bird.” “I have olive skin, and they’d kind of lighten my skin a lot in photos,” Furtado, who is of Portuguese decent, explained, “and kind of take my hips down all the time — they would always kind of cut off in editorials.”

She noted that by the time she released her sophomore album, 2003’s Folklore, she was “kind of angry about” the way beauty was portrayed. However, she always had a good group of people around her for support. “I felt so lucky and blessed. I always had such a good team around me, that was family,” she said. “My team around me felt so solid and really looking out for my best interests. And I think I was just raised right. My mom was really strong, and so is her mom, and her mom, and her mom — a very matriarchal family, in general, on both sides, all my grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. So I was given a really solid kind of sense of assertiveness, I’m going to call it. So that was a good tool for me to navigate the music industry. And I was given really solid advice from a young age, luckily, from very paternal sort of people around me. So I was lucky, I was one of the lucky ones.”

Furtado is fresh off the release of her seventh album, fittingly titled 7.  “The key for me, with this new album, is just getting back into the craft,” she said of the project, which she worked on with her daughter Nevis. “It’s like a whole new me, who’s stronger, braver, more confident.”