This essay analyses skin bleaching among middle-class Tanzanian women as performative practice. It draws on empirical material from interviews with middle-class Tanzanian women as well as from advertisements in Dar es Salaam. Skin bleaching is situated at a ‘site of ambivalence’ (Butler), revolving around ‘light beauty’ as postcolonial regulatory ideal. Thus on the one hand, skin bleaching is analyzed as a practice of ‘passing for light(-skinned), embodying urban ‘modern’ forms of subjectivation. On the other hand, the decolonizing potential of skin bleaching becomes apparent as the interviewed women’s forms of embodiment renegotiate postcolonial Blackness putting forward notions of ‘browning’ (Tate). However, ‘light beauty’ then also appears as norm, according to which forms of embodiment can only ‘fail’. In this regard, skin bleaching challenges essentialized notions of Blackness, embodied in the color of one’s skin, while it also illustrates the performativity of racialized embodiment and its intersections with other structural categories.