In this month’s edition of seventeen, supermodel Coco Rocha talks about body image. Her quote made me instantly fall in love with her – as if she weren’t gorgeous enough already, now I adore her inside too.

 

“You see a model walk down the street and she’s wearing jeans and a T-shirt, no makeup, her hair down, and she looks like a regular girl. For me just to look ‘natural’ in a photo takes two hours of hair and makeup, good lighting, styling, and Photoshop – and six hours later, you have the picture. But when I go home, it’s just me with no makeup, pimples, and a pair of baggy pants. That’s life – the rest is fantasy. We all need to remember that a photo is just what beauty was to one photographer on one day. You can’t compare yourself to those pictures. You are real. Photos are two-dimensional. Beauty is three-dimensional. Your confidence, your personality, your presence – it all adds to what makes you beautiful.”

We hear about positive body image and confidence all the time, but upon reading this it struck me that we don’t often hear models saying this to us (Tyra Banks is an exception to that rule). For Coco to flat out say that the photos we see of her aren’t even truly what she looks like helps to define the difference between photos as a way to capture a moment, and photos as artwork. I think it’s really important for us to acknowledge that line more often – photos of models in magazines aren’t real photos, they’re pieces of artwork. If we don’t try to be the Mona Lisa, why should we try to be what we see in magazines?

Do you think Coco had a good point? Is this as refreshing for you as it is for me?