The body positivity movement is about embracing your physical form, regardless of its shape, skin tone, sex, size, or ability. For Billy Corgan, co-founder and leader of long-running alt-rock band Smashing Pumpkins, that means celebrating the "port-wine" birthmarks that once caused him to be "teased unmercifully" as a child. Inspired by model Carlotta Bertotti, who has a prominent birthmark on her face, the songwriter detailed his journey in a poignant Instagram post.
"I’m a fan of body positivity movements because at the end of the day it is about celebrating what makes us ‘us,'" he wrote. "So as you see, here is a beautiful young woman (@carlotta_bertotti) with a birthmark who has embraced her ‘difference’ with grace. My point being that my whole life I’ve endeavored to hide my ‘port wine’ birthmarks because as you can imagine I was teased unmercifully about them as a child. So much so that people who have known me for a decade are shocked when they finally ‘see it.'"
Corgan writes that even today he's often stopped by strangers—"not because they recognize me but because they think something is wrong with me that requires medical attention." This leads to random questions, he says: "Is that a burn? Are you sick? Is it contagious? Does it hurt?" He ends the note with a message of positivity: "Whoever you are, I hope you find peace with who you are because: I would like to know that person and no one else."
As noted by WebMD, "port-wine stains" are "a kind of vascular birthmark, meaning that they're related to the skin's blood vessels." These birthmarks aren't preventable and "not caused by anything the mother does or doesn't do before or during their pregnancy." They occur when "chemical signals in tiny blood vessels don't 'turn off,' and those blood vessels get bigger," with the extra blood turning the skin red.
According to Rolling Stone, Corgan's first band, The Marked, was named after the birthmarks. They're also famously featured on the cover of his debut solo LP, 2005's TheFutureEmbrace, which shows his hands flanking his face. After his initial post, the musician elaborated in a subsequent Instagram video, adding more context to his comments. During the clip, he pulls his up sleeve, showing more birthmarks near his shoulder.
He also talks about how he initially found Bertotti's Instagram page and was "sort of struck" by how "not only has she embraced her birthmark but that we now live in a world where what used to be something that would disqualify her from being a model now is something that people are embracing." He continued, "She's certainly very beautiful, so I'm not saying she wouldn't be a model. I don't think it's one of those things. I think it's now that people are now really expanding the standard of what's beautiful. Having grown up born in 1967, never in a million years was I told that something like this was beautiful or could be additive to who I was."
In 2019, a 2-year-old named Lydia made headlines for her very mature reaction to new classmates staring at her facial port-wine stain. As her mom noted, "Instead of getting upset or self conscious, Lydia simply walked over to her cubby, pulled out the copy of Sam's Birthmark," a children's book written specifically for those with prominent birthmarks, "and handed it to her teacher to read to the class.”
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