14 Stars Who Embraced The Features They Were Told To "Fix"

Arsheen Kaur SahniWed, October 7, 2026 at 5:46 PM UTC

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I believe that celebrities are responsible for creating certain trends, whether they mean to or not. From beauty standards to the features we suddenly decide we need to “fix,” it’s pretty hard not to notice how much influence famous people have over what we consider attractive. However, every once in a while, a celebrity comes along who embraced a part of themselves that they could easily have changed and chose not to.I find that refreshing because we’re so used to seeing celebrities with perfect skin, perfectly straight teeth, and features that seem almost too polished to be real. It can be easy to forget that most of the things we’re taught to be insecure about are actually completely normal. So, when a celebrity talks openly about a scar, acne, crooked teeth, or another feature they’ve decided not to change, I’m always a little more interested.Here are 14 celebrities who've spoken about the unique traits they’ve chosen to keep, and I have to say, I love seeing people in the spotlight being unapologetically themselves.1. Kirsten Dunst was only 17 when a Hollywood producer decided her teeth needed a little work and actually took her to the dentist to get them straightened—without even asking her first. Dunst recalled the bizarre experience in a 2024 interview with British GQ, where she said she simply refused. “No, I like my teeth,” she told the producer. At such a young age, she was already hearing that certain parts of her face needed to be changed.

Christina House / Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesDunst has since credited director Sofia Coppola, who worked with her when she was 16, with helping her feel more comfortable in her own skin. Coppola reportedly told her, “I love your teeth!” and Dunst later admitted that she didn’t fully realize how meaningful those words were at the time. I think it’s pretty sweet that a comment that probably seemed so small at the time ended up meaning so much to her later on.

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2. Cindy Crawford's famous beauty mark wasn't always something she loved. Growing up, her sister called it her “ugly mark,” and other kids at school teased her about it, so Crawford actually wanted to have it removed. Her mother talked her out of it with one very practical argument. She pointed out that Crawford already knew what her mole looked like, but she had no idea what the scar from removing it would look like. That stayed with Crawford, and she ultimately decided to keep her mole.

Taylor Hill / Getty ImagesI really cannot picture Cindy Crawford without the beauty mark. Crawford has said it helped women who had beauty marks of their own identify with her because, as she put it, “They set you apart.”

© Warner Bros. / courtesy Everett Collection3. Imagine being told that the thing people are making a fuss about on your face is actually something other people are paying to get. That was basically British model Georgia May Jagger's experience with her famous gap-toothed smile. The daughter of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, she told Vogue that she never really noticed the gap growing up and only became aware of it after she started modeling and the press began making a big deal about it.

John Phillips / Getty ImagesThen her mom told her that people in America were actually paying to have their teeth changed to create a gap. Georgia's response to that was pretty simple: “That's insane! Why would you pay money for this?” I mean, fair. Her gap was already one of the things that made her smile so distinctive, so I love that she chose to keep it exactly as it was!

Dia Dipasupil / FilmMagic

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - MARCH 15: Georgia May Jagger attends the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted By Mark Guiducci at Los Angeles County Museum of Art on March 15, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Dia Dipasupil/FilmMagic)

4. Tina Fey has a scar on the left side of her face from an attack when she was 5-years-old, but she rarely talked about it publicly for years. In 2025, she opened up about how much more noticeable it had been when she was younger—particularly when she started auditioning for acting jobs.

Dominik Bindl / Getty ImagesShe told her longtime friend Amy Poehler on her Good Hang podcast that one of the more awkward moments came during a McDonald's commercial audition. After commuting for 45 minutes, Fey realized the commercial involved someone driving up to a window, which meant the left side of her face, and her scar, would be front and center. She figured she wasn't getting the job anyway, so she decided to have a little fun with it. During the audition, she ordered a Filet-O-Fish meal and then added, “And my scar will have an orange soda.” She didn't book the commercial, but that is such a Tina Fey way to handle an incredibly uncomfortable situation. I love it.

Good Hang with Amy Poehler / Viayoutube.comFey said the scar had become much less noticeable over the years, and she had mostly learned to forget about it.

©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection5. Chrissy Teigen has never been particularly interested in pretending her body looks like the heavily edited photos that flood Instagram. She has repeatedly shared photos of her stretch marks over the years, even jokingly calling them her “stretchies” and once captioning a photo of them simply, “Whatevs.”

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Teigen has also been refreshingly honest about why she does it. In 2017, she talked about how seeing seemingly perfect bodies all over Instagram could make her feel inadequate, and said that she had noticed pretty much everyone had stretch marks when she'd worked on modeling shoots. Seeing other women with them made her feel better, so she wanted to give other people that same feeling.

IAN MAULE / AFP via Getty ImagesThen, after giving birth to her son Miles in 2018, she shared a video showing the stretch marks on her hips and joked about them while making it clear that they weren't magically going away. She admitted she was still insecure and didn't even consider herself fully “body confident,” but she was happy that showing her “regular ol' body” could make someone else feel less alone. She kept that same openness when she had her breast implants removed. In 2024, Teigen shared photos and video that showed the surgical scars left behind, jokingly captioning the post, “Boobies out, scars out.”

Chrissy Teigen6. Barbra Streisand had been told more than once that she should get a nose job, even at the height of her career. In an excerpt from her 2023 memoir My Name Is Barbra, the singer opened up about the pressure she faced to change her appearance, including being told to have her teeth capped.

Matt Winkelmeyer / Getty Images for UCLA Institute of the Environment & SustainabilityStreisand never went through with either. She said she liked her appearance as it was, especially her long nose, and worried that surgery could even affect her singing voice. “Isn’t my talent enough?” she wrote, adding that a nose job would be painful, expensive, and “too much of a risk.” She also revealed that the comments about her appearance had stayed with her, admitting she was “still hurt by the insults.” I mean, she had a point. She was already Barbra Streisand, and changing her face was never going to change the fact that people had decided they wanted her to look a certain way.

Courtesy Everett Collection7. Joaquin Phoenix has a small scar on his upper lip that has been part of his face since birth. The actor has explained that it was actually a natural birthmark, although the unusual mark was apparently noticeable enough that a doctor once mistook it for the result of a cleft-lip operation. Phoenix has also said he considers the mark an “act of God,” rather than something that needed to be changed.

Stephane Cardinale - Corbis / Corbis via Getty ImagesAccording to Phoenix, his mother went through intense pain while she was pregnant with him, and after he was born, she took him to a doctor who apparently looked at his face and asked, “Who did this harelip operation?” The doctor reportedly assumed the scar was from surgery and even called it one of the best operations he had ever seen. His family eventually realized there had never been an operation at all, it was simply a mark he was born with. For years, the scar wasn't something the wider public seemed to pay much attention to. That changed when talk-show host Wendy Williams brought it up while discussing Phoenix's appearance. She pointed out the shape of his nose and the scar on his upper lip, then speculated that he had a “hairline fracture” and a cleft lip or cleft palate. She even said she found the feature “very attractive.”

Wendy Williams Productions / Viayoutube.com

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Her comments were met with strong criticism, particularly from people in the cleft community, and Williams later addressed the backlash on Twitter, saying she wanted to “apologize to the cleft community.” Prime example of why people should probably not comment on someone else’s looks when they have no idea what the full story is.

© Warner Bros. / Courtesy Everett Collection8. Alicia Keys has dealt with acne for far longer than most people probably realize. She told Byrdie that she first started experiencing breakouts when she was “very young” and continued dealing with acne well into her 20s and 30s. I think a lot of people who deal with acne can relate to that feeling of wondering when it’s finally going to stop being something you have to think about.

Phillip Faraone / Getty Images for Toei Animation Inc.“I was like, ‘What the hell? I thought this was supposed to be a 16- to 18-year-old thing. When am I going to be free from this?’” she recalled. Keys also admitted that learning to be patient with herself was part of dealing with her skin, rather than constantly treating every breakout like something that needed to be hidden. That experience ended up changing the way Keys thought about beauty and she started showing up without makeup, She still had acne, she still had days when her skin probably bothered her, but she wasn’t treating it like something that needed to be hidden every time she stepped outside. “My relationship with beauty now is I get to choose however I want to experience and express. It’s not an imposition; it’s something that I get to create for myself.”

© Amazon Studios / courtesy Everett Collection9. Emma Watson spent years having her freckles covered up with makeup while filming the Harry Potter movies, so it's not surprising that she eventually became more protective of them. She has said that she felt self-conscious about her freckles when she was younger, but as she got older, she started embracing them and wanting her natural skin to actually show through her makeup.

Arnold Jerocki / GC ImagesThat became especially important to Watson when she filmed Beauty and the Beast. She told Vogue she made sure Belle’s freckles stayed in the final look because she knew there were plenty of young girls going through puberty who were probably wishing theirs would disappear. “I felt the need to say that I have them and that I think the look of natural skin is beautiful,” she explained. “I didn’t want to get blanked out!” Hermione Granger was always pretty firm about standing up for what she believed in, so this feels very on-brand for Emma Watson too.

©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection10. Aimee Lou Wood, the Sex Education and The White Lotus star, has been pretty open about growing up feeling self-conscious about her teeth because they didn’t fit the idea of a “perfect” smile. People would comment on them, but instead of changing them, she decided to embrace what made her smile different.

Scott Garfitt / BAFTA via Getty ImagesThat confidence was tested last year when Saturday Night Live made her teeth the punchline of a sketch mocking her White Lotus character, Chelsea. The sketch gave the character exaggerated fake teeth and made a joke about fluoride, which Aimee later called out.

SNL ProductionsShe said she wasn't against being made fun of—she just wanted the joke to actually be funny. “I actually love being taken the piss out of when it’s clever and in good spirits,” she wrote, before adding the line that really summed up her point: “I have big gap teeth, not bad teeth.” You go queen!

Aimee Lou Wood11. If you've ever heard Seal's Kiss from a Rose, you probably recognize his voice instantly. You probably recognize his face, too, particularly the scars that became one of his most distinctive features. Those scars were caused by discoid lupus, which Seal said first appeared when he was 21.

David Livingston / Getty Images

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He admitted that he was initially self-conscious about them, but over time, his perspective changed. In 2020, he told Yahoo Lifestyle that something that had been “initially traumatizing” had ultimately made him “instantly recognizable.” Seal also said he eventually realized that “this body is not who we are” and felt that he had “got off lightly.” Rather than trying to hide the scars, he has never shied away from talking about them and even referred to them as his “battle wounds.”

Cindy Ord / Getty Images12. Sarah Jessica Parker has never seemed particularly interested in changing the features that make her look like, well, Sarah Jessica Parker. When Alex Cooper asked her in 2023 about some of the comments she'd received about her appearance, Parker described them as “just discussions of my physical person” and made it clear that the things people were criticizing weren't things she had ever wanted to change.

Jamie McCarthy / Getty Images for Tribeca FestivalThe commentary around Parker’s appearance got pretty wild, too. Her nose became such a talking point that Saturday Night Live even did a Sex and the City sketch with a prosthetic version of it. Parker later said the criticism was focused on “something that I couldn't change and wouldn't change and had never considered changing.” She also had a very fair question for the people who seemed so invested in her appearance. “Why do you seem angry about it, or why do you feel it's necessary to comment?” she asked. The funny thing is, she said she never really got the chance to ask the people criticizing her that directly.

SNL Productions13. Minka Kelly has a pretty straightforward way of looking at the scars on her body: they’re hers, so why would she want to get rid of them? She has several, including a scar from an appendectomy she had as a child and another from a boogie-boarding accident, and she has spoken openly about being proud of them.

Raymond Hall / GC ImagesThat attitude was especially clear when she discovered that a scar on her stomach had been airbrushed out of her October 2010 Esquire cover. Instead of being embarrassed by it, Kelly made it clear that she actually wanted the scar there. “It’s mine!” she said. “That’s what makes my midsection my own. If anyone had to identify me, that’d be my thing. It’s my thing!” In another interview, Kelly explained that she had learned to appreciate imperfections because they were what made people unique. “The scar from the appendectomy I had when I was little and the one from the boogie boarding accident I had a few years ago make me unique, and I’m proud of them,” she said.

Steven A Henry / WireImage14. Winnie Harlow was diagnosed with vitiligo when she was around three or four years old. She has spoken about being bullied at school and feeling isolated because of the patches on her skin, with other kids even telling her they couldn’t play with her because they thought they could “catch” it. When Harlow later pursued modeling, one agency reportedly told her she should become a makeup artist instead of a model because of her skin.

Ferda Demir / Getty ImagesHarlow has also been pretty honest about what accepting her skin actually looked like for her. It wasn’t necessarily about waking up one morning and deciding she loved every single thing about herself. “It’s me, and I love me, so everyone else is going to have to deal with it,” she said in a 2015 interview. She has also pointed out that her issue wasn’t really with her skin, but with the way other people treated her because of it. During her time on America’s Next Top Model, Harlow has recalled being called a cow or panda by photo consultant Yu Tsai, who was pointing to the pattern of her vitiligo.

The CWHarlow has also been clear that choosing not to cover her vitiligo is a personal decision, not something she thinks everyone else should have to do. “I chose not to cover my skin,” she explained. “It’s not because someone told me I shouldn’t. That was my choice.”

© Vertical Entertainment / courtesy Everett CollectionWe spend so much time being told what we should fix, cover up, or change about ourselves that it’s genuinely refreshing to see people decide that they’re perfectly happy leaving certain things alone. These celebrities didn’t all have the same experiences or feel the same way about their appearances, but they all ended up making that choice for themselves, and I’ll take that over another celebrity telling us what we’re supposed to look like ANY DAY. What do you think about this? Let us know in the comments.

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