Up until fairly recently my Twitter bio read ‘brown goth’. Not hugely professional, I know. But incredibly telling. Those two social constructs of race and subculture were how I’d always chosen to define myself to the outside world; less of a bold statement but more of an explanation – ‘This is why I like coffins and am obsessed with Halloween, but why I’m not blindingly pale.’

Because the goth scene, to most, evokes images of ghostly pale skin and long dark hair; think Morticia Addams, Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice or Siouxsie Sioux – widely seen as goth’s original poster-girl after the term was coined in the Eighties as an off-shoot of punk. And it’s those heavily kohl’d eyes, angst-ridden blanched pallor and blood red lips that still sets the dominant gothic aesthetic to this day – an aesthetic that, it turns out, is laborious to recreate on dark skin. To say the very least.

I’d spent most of my life being an outsider, truthfully. I’d always had this uneasy feeling of ‘otherness’ that’s hard to contextualise at any age – let alone as a child. I was one of the few non-white kids in my school, I was a bit chubby (me and puddings go way back) and I was quite introverted.

I muddled along, not really questioning why my experiences of everything around me felt so jarring, but as I hit my early teens, I finally found an outlet for my malcontent – music. I came to adore indie goth bands like Manic Street Preachers, Mansun and Placebo who dominated the Nineties and, like them, soon my wardrobe solely consisted of black velvet, lace and band T-shirts on rotation.

“How I found my beauty identity as a goth of colour”