What Does a Bollywood Actress Look Like?
A data visualization examining skin tone patterns across 115 Bollywood actress debuts from 2000–2026, drawn from a larger dataset of thousands of actors and films spanning decades of Hindi cinema.
I have loved Hindi movies for my entire life and anecdotally knew lead actresses tended to look a certain way. I wanted to see if this beauty standard was measurable, so I built a dataset around thousands of actors and movies to try and find a pattern. For this visualization, I looked at lead actresses who have debuted since 2000, and sampled skin tones from their natural-light selfies as the proxy for how they chose to present themselves. In addition, I identified whether each actress has endorsed skin bleaching beauty products.
The patterns for what the industry has pushed to its audience as "beautiful" is hard to unsee.