Nelly Furtado has spoken about the ways magazines used to edit her images during her career in the early 2000s, saying they would “lighten” her “olive skin”.
READ MORE: Nelly Furtado on her return to music: “Something told me I needed to get back in”
In an interview with People, the singer shared that she was subject to “a lot of airbrushing” in editorial images during her early career. She also revealed that some publications would go as far as to change her skin tone, saying: “I have olive skin, and they’d kind of lighten my skin a lot in photos.”
Furtado also shared how they would edit the size of her hips. “They would always kind of cut off in editorials,” she said, resulting in her becoming “kind of angry about” the beauty standards set by the media.
Nelly Furtado. Credit: Martin Philbey
However, the ‘Maneater’ singer shared that she “felt so lucky and blessed” to have had the support of her family during that time. “I always had such a good team around me, that was family,” she said. “My team around me felt so solid and really looking out for my best interests. And I think I was just raised right. My mom was really strong, and so is her mom, and her mom, and her mom – a very matriarchal family, in general, on both sides, all my grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.
“So I was given a really solid kind of sense of assertiveness, I’m going to call it. So that was a good tool for me to navigate the music industry. And I was given really solid advice from a young age, luckily, from very paternal sort of people around me. So I was lucky, I was one of the lucky ones.”
Furtado’s latest album ‘7’ was released on September 20, marking her first studio LP in seven years. Speaking to NME before its release, she said “I hadn’t set foot in a studio in about three years, but something told me I needed to get back in.”
Earlier this year, Furtado said that she thinks a potential Las Vegas residency with longtime collaborator Timbaland would be “really fun”. The two first worked together for her seminal third album from 2006, ‘Loose’. They later teamed up with Justin Timberlake on the 2007 hit ‘Give It To Me’ and most recently, last year’s ‘Keep Going Up’.
‘Loose’ spawned numerous hits for Furtado and Timbaland, including songs like ‘Maneater’, ‘Promiscuous’, ‘Say It Right’, ‘In God’s Hands’ and ‘All Good Things (Come To An End)’.
Speaking to NME, she said: “I think it would be really fun for Timbaland and I to do a Vegas residency of ‘Loose’. We could play the album from beginning to end, because I do think it captures the world we were in at the time.”
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