Selena Gomez has been open about her struggles with body image over the years, and she contemplated that topic once again in a recent Instagram Story.
In one slide, Selena posted a photo of herself when she was much younger, wearing a tiny zebra-stripe bikini. “Today, I realize I will never look like this again…,” she wrote.
The “Calm Down” singer followed that with a more recent photo of herself in a black-and-white two-piece with more coverage.
“I’m not perfect but I’m proud to be who I am,” she captioned it. “Sometimes I forget it’s ok to be me.”
In an interview with Fast Company in October, Selena talked about “those moments of not feeling positive about how I looked because of what I’d see on Instagram — ‘Wow, I wish my body looked like that.’” She got off social media for a time, but internet trolls still criticized her appearance.
She also admitted to feeling embarrassed that she could no longer fit into sample sizes, even though, as she noted, “How unrealistic is it to expect a normal woman’s body not to change?”
In 2018 she composed a post that got 3 million likes, in which she slammed “The beauty myth” as “an obsession with physical perfection that traps modern woman in an endless cycle of hopelessness, self consciousness, and self-hatred as she tries to fulfill society’s impossible definition of flawless beauty.”
“I chose to take care of myself because I want to, not to prove anything to anyone,” she added.
Selena has ultimately had the last laugh, though: Those feelings inspired her to create her Rare Beauty line, whose goal is to make people feel good about themselves, but also to support the conversation around mental health.
Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
