Cindy Crawford’s beauty mark may be a part of her iconic look now, but it wasn’t always so encouraged by the industry.
When speaking with Naomi Campbell for her limited series No Filter With Naomi on Monday, April 6, the 54-year-old model revealed that she was told she’d have to remove her signature mole at the start of her career. But luckily her mom stepped in.
“When I went to my first modeling agency, they said I should remove it and my mother was like, ‘Okay, you can do that, but you don’t know what the scar will look like,” said Crawford. “You know what your beauty mark looks like.’”
However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing with her mole. Sometimes makeup artists would struggle to try and cover it. “It’s not flat,” she said. “You can’t cover up my mole otherwise it looks like a gigantic pimple or something.” Other times, publications would even airbrush it out.
“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,” she said. “So there is a cover of me out there with no mole. When Campbell asked how that made her feel, she replied, “Look, as a kid I hated having a beauty mark. My sister’s called it an ugly mark.”
But Campbell reassured her that she always wished she had one, so much so that she’d draw a fake one on with eyeliner. “I feel like we always want what we don’t have,” Crawford noted.
It wasn’t really until her first American Vogue cover that she truly was able to embrace it. “So when I did my first American Vogue cover with Richard Avedon and Polly Melon, I didn’t know if they would leave it on or not, and then they did and I think once it was on the cover of American Vogue then it wasn’t an issue anymore,” Crawford said. “If it was good enough for Vogue, it’s fine.”
Now she’s able to be proud of her signature look. “I feel like for me, so many women have beauty marks and when they saw me on the cover of Vogue or in a magazine with my beauty mark it made them feel more comfortable about their own beauty marks. And it made them remember me. It became the thing that set me apart in a weird way. So often the thing that we see that sets us apart and we’re insecure about, it becomes the very thing that makes us stand out. And I think that was a big lesson for me.”
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