All round

Cindy Crawford was told to remove her ‘ugly’ beauty spot: ‘I hated it’

Via

411 HQ

Updated on July 6, 2023

See more articles on:

get top stories via email

Cindy Crawford, a legendary supermodel, has admitted that when she first entered the fashion industry, someone told her to get rid of her famous beauty spot.

The 54-year-old supermodel started her modeling career in high school, but was advised to get the recognizable mole above her lip removed.

Cindy explained: “I did a British Vogue cover, I think with David Bailey, before I did an American Vogue cover and on the British Vogue cover they retouched it out. So there is a cover of me out there with no mole.” This was in an interview with Naomi Campbell for her limited series “No Filter with Naomi.”

“Apparently, if it was on the right side it was a beauty mark, and if it was on the left it was an ugly mark,” Crawford said. “I would get teased by the other kids in school, so I definitely wanted to get it removed. But my mother always said, ‘You know what your mole looks like, you don’t know what the scar is going to look like.’ Now it’s so much just a part of my face that I don’t think, ‘Oh, how’s my mole doing today?’ But it’s the thing that made people remember me, and it made a lot of women who also have beauty marks identify with me. They set you apart. Honestly, though, if I was designing my face from scratch I don’t know if I would have designed it with the mole.”

Crawford, who began her career as a youngster in Chicago, decided against having the mole removed but claims a makeup artist tried to conceal it nevertheless. “It’s not flat. You can’t cover up my mole otherwise it looks like a gigantic pimple or something,” she says.

The actress claims she wasn’t certain whether or not the final photographs would be edited after shooting her first American Vogue cover in 1986. She tells Campbell that “it just wasn’t an issue anymore” when the publication eventually hit newsstands and her beauty mark was clearly visible. “If it’s good enough for [American] Vogue, it’s fine.”

Campbell responds, “I think it’s a perfection, not a imperfection. It’s all part of making you and your persona. It’s part of your being.”

She continues: “I have a scar right here,” pointing to her upper lip, “They told me, in New York when I first got here at 16, ‘Oh, you’ve got to have plastic surgery’.” To which Campbell’s mom said, “Absolutely not, it’s not happening.”

“So many women have beauty marks,” Crawford says. “I think that when they saw me on the cover of Vogue or in a magazine with their beauty mark, it made them feel more comfortable about their own beauty marks. It made them remember me. It became the thing that set me apart in a weird way.”

“So often the thing that we [think] sets us apart and maybe we’re insecure about, it becomes the very thing that makes us stand out. I think that was a big lesson for me.”

Campbell, 49, admitted that she had long envied the distinctive feature of her fellow supe. “I always wanted one so much! I used to put black eyeliner [dots] on my face,” she said. “I think it’s a perfection, not an imperfection. It’s all part of making you and your persona. It’s part of your being.”