Cindy Crawford was fellow OG supermodel Naomi’s Campbell‘s first guest on her new No Filter YouTube series she launched on Apr. 6. While the two reminisced about photo shoots together early in their careers, Cindy revealed that she had been asked to removed the mole above her lip if she hoped for a future in the modeling industry. Naomi first asked Cindy about her famous beauty mark and whether or not Vogue would keep it or take it out on her covers. “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,” Cindy, 54, revealed.
Naomi asked Cindy how that made her feel and she responded, “Look, as a kid I hated having a beauty mark. My sister’s called it an ugly mark.” Naomi told her she wished she had one, even drawing one on her face. “I feel like we always want what we don’t have. Like girls with curly hair want straight hair, girls with straight hair always want curly hair,” Cindy replied.
“So when I went to my first modeling agency they said I should remove it,” Cindy explained. “It was in Chicago. It was a tiny little agency, I don’t even remember the name of it. They said I should remove it and my mother was like, ‘Ok, you can do that but you don’t know what the scar will look like. You know what your beauty mark looks like.'” Score one for Cindy’s mom in helping her keep it!
“So, I started modeling a little bit and in Chicago some people tried to cover it up. But it’s not flat, you can’t cover up my mole otherwise it looks like a gigantic pimple. Chicago seemed fine but when I worked in Japan, sometimes they would retouch it off, or my first British Vogue cover,” Cindy continued.
‘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. If it was good enough for Vogue, it’s fine,” Cindy explained.
The beauty mark became Cindy’s trademark and what set her apart from other supermodels of the day. “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,” Cindy confessed.
You can watch the full conversation in the above video. It starts at the approximately 10 minute mark.