Lectures on Tap - "Skin Deep:The Global Beauty Industry's Colorism Problem"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "Skin Deep: The Global Beauty Industry's Colorism Problem"

🎙️ Speaker: Fatiah Touray, Esq.

Why does lighter skin still sell everywhere? From colonial empires to modern influencers, shade has long shaped status, opportunity, and profit across the globe. Join us for an eye-opening evening as Fatiah Touray unpacks how colorism became embedded in the global beauty industry—from Hollywood and Bollywood to K-beauty, skin-lightening markets, and the billion-dollar cosmetics economy.

We’ll explore “pretty privilege” as a form of social currency: who benefits, who pays the price, and how beauty standards quietly structure power. Blending history, sociology, psychology, and pop culture, this lecture reveals how something as everyday as foundation shades or skincare trends is tied to global systems of inequality—and how those systems are finally being challenged.

Fatiah Touray, Esq., is Assistant Vice Chancellor for Global Access and Engagement at NYU Abu Dhabi, with over two decades of experience spanning law, higher education, nonprofit leadership, and teaching, and a deep focus on colorism as a global, structural phenomenon.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.