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My mother was from Scotland and had very fair skin... she wouldn't allow us to go in the sun.

I'm pretty fair-skinned, so I need to get in the sun for a little while.

There's a way in which you can look at clothing as your outer skin. And because you were discriminated against because of your complexion, the way in which you could overcome that was through the way in which you presented yourself with your clothing.

I come from a mixed background - my mom's black, my dad's white - and I traveled around the world.

For the majority of the time, I may as well have been just a really tan white kid. You know, I may as well have just been, like, a fat kid.

I was raised in a very sheltered, narrow environment.

My father was Bolivian, which makes me half-Bolivian. It's where I got some of my exotic features and certainly my skin tone.

Basically, when I went to school in Sri Lanka from age five onward, the classes there were sometimes sorted into a hierarchy of your skin tone. So the fairer-skinned kids sat at the front row, and the darker-skinned kids sat at the back by the poor ones who played out in the street all day long.

I'm light skinned, and I used to lean on that because that's something a lot of black people pride themselves on, and it's weird.