From filters to fairness: understanding colourism through TikTok aesthetics and trends

This study investigates how British South Asian women engage with and interpret skincare and beauty content on TikTok, with particular attention to how the platform reproduces, normalizes, and commodifies colourism through its algorithmic and influencer-driven structures. The study is qualitative in design centring participants' own accounts of how TikTok's beauty culture shapes their self-perception, identity, and consumption practices. Data were collected from 15 participants via an online survey of open-ended qualitative questions, supplemented by a small number of descriptive Likert-scale items used solely as contextual framing. Participants' open-ended narratives form the exclusive analytical basis of the study and were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The findings reveal that TikTok operates as both a site of creative self-expression and a mechanism that participants experienced as reinforcing colonial hierarchies of skin tone through subtle and overt colourist discourses. Participants reported that repeated exposure to brightening trends and influencer marketing heightened self-comparison and internalized beauty pressures. However, participants also demonstrated moments of resistance and critical reflection, challenging these ideals and reclaiming pride in their natural complexions. The tension between internalization and resistance emerges as the study's central analytical contribution: these positions coexist within individuals rather than representing opposing responses, revealing the structural ambiguity of agency within platform capitalism. Overall, the study concludes that TikTok's algorithmically personalized content simultaneously reinforces and exposes colourism, shaping how British South Asian women understand and negotiate identity amid digital empowerment and structural inequality.