Cindy Crawford was told to remove her beauty mark

7 April 2020

Cindy Crawford was told to remove her famous beauty mark.

Cindy Crawford

The 54-year-old supermodel began her modelling career in high school, but was told she would need to remove her trademark mole above her lip if she wanted to become a model.

In an interview with Naomi Campbell for her limited series 'No Filter with Naomi', 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.

"When I went to my first modelling agency ... 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.'"

Instead, Cindy decided to keep her mole but many publications tried to cover it up with makeup or edit it out of their photographs as it was seen as an imperfection.

She explained: "So, I started modelling a little bit and in Chicago some people tried to cover it up. 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."

Naomi then asked how she felt about having her face retouched, and Cindy said: "I didn't really - as a kid I hated having a beauty mark. My sister's called it an ugly mark. 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."

However, when she posed for American Vogue, the photographers decided to keep her photographs untouched, creating her trademark spot.

She continued: "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."

Now, Cindy sees her beauty mark as a way to help women feel comfortable in their own skin.

She added: "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 with their own beauty mark."