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In human society there exists colour based variation. In many ethnicities, colour variation isassociated with beauty and attractiveness prevails in society. In dominant endogamoussocieties within an ethnicity, these characteristics are preserved and highly prioritized asmarkers of physical attractiveness in that ethnicity. Such dominant groups within an ethnicitydominate others, among other things, in terms of public portrayal, places, spaces and variousopportunities on the basis of characteristics largely possessed and hence prized by dominantgroups and are held up as aspiration goals to the rest. People who have fairer skin tone ascompared to the darker skin tone tries to dominate other in terms of public portrayal. Thesepublic portrayals are clearly seen in the case of visual mass media like cinema andadvertisement. This paper explores whether such skin colour tone based bias exists in case ofBangali ethnicity. The skin tone of heroes and heroines of popular Bangla films produced inWest Bengal was taken as a proxy to explore the nature of skin colour tone based bias (ifany), in case of the Bangla mother tongue population, the 5th largest mother tonguepopulation in the world. We found that the heroes and heroines have significantly lighter skintones than other males and females of same ethnicity who are portrayed in a film. The resultssuggest that there exists significant skin colour based bias in the selection of heroes andheroines in Bangla films.