“I felt so insulted.”

Iza Calzado is in the middle of telling Allure Philippines about one specific time in her 23-year showbiz career. She was the face of a certain beauty brand that offered different kinds of products, and had billboards looming all over the metro. At the time, the brand was pushing their whitening line, and Calzado was obliged to shoot a TV commercial for it. “I had been running a lot outdoors, so I was more tan than usual. Sa shoot, pinaglagyan nila ako ng puting foundation,” she recalls, the disbelief in her face and voice as fresh as if it had taken place only yesterday.

“Hindi ko talaga gusto! I looked… funny. Parang, what is this?” she deadpans. “But at the time,” she muses, “I was also applying body makeup for my stretch marks. I just told myself, ‘Well, if you’re covering your stretch marks, then, they’re covering your real color.’”

Nothing but love for her skin

Calzado has long been very open and vocal about her battles with her body image. After being overweight for most of her childhood, she entered showbiz with a figure that was still heavier than your average telenovela star. She would then go on to struggle with weight loss, fad diets, exercise, general health and fitness issues, and above all, making peace with her body and herself. But for all the frustration with her body that she has shared in public, the opposite is the case for her famous morena skin tone—she loves it.

Love, in fact, seems too tame a word for her relationship with her morena skin. The exuberant Calzado is besotted, enamored, enraptured, and completely, totally smitten with her golden-toned, caramel-colored skin.

Still not the ideal for others 

But it wasn’t always that way. Growing up, she felt a certain sense of otherness, being a morena in a country where the white mestiza was still the beauty ideal.

As a child, Calzado felt it from her very own mother—who was, in Calzado’s words, “very fair, super tisay, and had moods where sometimes she would love my skin color, sometimes she would not.” As she describes her late mother to us, it’s clear that Calzado thought she was very beautiful. “She was fair-skinned, with a great figure,” Calzado shares. “And I was dark and overweight, and I’d look at her, and then at myself, and go ‘Whyyyyyy?’” It’s a stab at humor to lighten up a heavy topic, but Calzado eventually admits, “I associated my dark skin with looking like my dad. I wasn’t teased about it, but it was not considered beautiful.”

Later on, when she was already an actress, Calzado shares that she had people tell her, “Do you ever think of how much more beautiful you’d be if you were whiter?” “I’ve had somebody actually say that to me,” she says, “kasi yun yung definition nila of what’s beautiful. But ako, I love my skin color!”

BJ Pascual

An assist from a Hollywood pop star

The jump from feeling inadequate next to her fair-skinned mother, to embracing and loving her morena skin tone was made possible for Calzado thanks to a little boost from a certain pop icon: Jennifer Lopez.

“I was in high school when J.Lo came out, and I really wanted to be her, with her bronzed skin!” Calzado laughs. It was a time for skin whitening, and locally, it was not the thing to possess that bronzed glow. “Hindi pa siya ganoon ka-accepted,” Calzado adds, “but I guess ‘cause I was really into Hollywood, hindi ako bothered.”

It seems like a funny little anecdote, that in emulating a Hollywood star, Calzado’s entire perspective of her brown skin shifted. But when you take a look at the parallels—their skin tone, curvier body shapes, and careers in the entertainment industry—you begin to realize that what Calzado found in J.Lo was a role model to validate her existence. 

And in the same way that J.Lo completely changed how Calzado viewed herself, perhaps, in being so open about her own insecurities—whether about her body, as she has done countless times, or about her experiences with her morena skin, as she is doing now—Calzado is validating many others who are curvy, and who are morena.

Making oneself vulnerable in public, Calzado shares, is difficult. “But when you take hold of the narrative, the power is yours. The liberation comes from being the first to tell your story.”

Photographer: BJ Pascual. Makeup: Gery Penaso. Hair: Renz Pangilinan. Fashion styling: Maica Tady of Qurator, assisted by Claire Fernando, Shark Tanael, and Bea Panganiban.

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