Having been teased about her now-iconic mole throughout her childhood, it took years — decades, even — for Cindy Crawford to embrace her signature mark.
"As a kid, I hated having a beauty mark," the supermodel told Naomi Campbell during the "No Filter with Naomi" YouTube series. "My sisters called it an 'ugly mark.'"
At the time, others saw the mole above her lip as a sort of stain on her face, too.
"When I went to my first modeling agency, they said I should remove it," she said. "My mother was like, 'Okay, you can do that, but you don't know what the scar will look like. You know what your beauty mark looks like.'"
While Cindy obviously kept it, she said makeup artists would often try and cover it up. Some magazines simply got rid of it.
"I did a British Vogue cover, I think with [photographer] David Bailey," she said. "And on the British Vogue cover, they retouched it out. So there is a cover of me out there with no mole, but it is me."
In 1986, though, Cindy did a cover shoot for American Vogue, and the editors left the mole there in all its glory. From that moment on, Cindy began loving her beauty mark.
"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," she said. "If it's good enough for Vogue, it's fine."
The tide has certainly turned since then, and Cindy, 54, hopes she's living proof that women can be beautiful in their own way.
"So many women have beauty marks," she said. "And I think that 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. It made them remember me. It became the thing that set me apart, in a weird way."
"So often the thing that we [believe] sets us apart and maybe we're insecure about, it becomes the very thing that makes us stand out," she continued. "I think that was a big lesson for me."