LeAnn Rimes is over hiding her skin.
The “Long Live Love” singer, who was diagnosed with psoriasis at just two years old, gave fans an unprecedented look at her current flare-up, which was sparked by the stress of 2020. In the photos, which were taken for Glamour, she sat in an empty field and stared confidently into the camera.
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In an essay featured alongside the photos, Leann got candid about her lifelong struggle to accept her skin. Her condition was rough from the beginning; at just six years old, every part of her body except her face, hands and feet was “covered in painful red spots.”
“These weren’t the days when there were commercials about psoriasis on TV or open discussions about skin conditions. No one was talking about this. And certainly not when I signed my first record deal at 11. In the world we lived in, our ‘flaws’ were not invited to the forefront.”
As she found fame in the country music world as a teen, she worried about people noticing her psoriasis and went to great lengths to conceal it.
“Onstage I’d often wear two pairs of pantyhose or jeans—even in 95-degree heat. Underneath my shirt, my whole stomach would be covered in thick scales that would hurt and bleed. For so much of my life, I felt like I had to hide,” she explained.
LeAnn was happy when she found a treatment in her 20s that seemed to keep her skin clear. She continued to use it until she “felt at ease going off them” a few years ago. Her condition seemed stable, but things changed this year.
“All hell broke loose in the world—and inside of me, as I’m sure it did for so many other people amid this pandemic,” she wrote. “Suddenly I went from doing what I love, and being surrounded by people, to just hanging around the house in sweats. Stress is a common trigger for psoriasis, and with so much uncertainty happening, my flare-ups came right back.”
While the musician had talked publicly about her psoriasis battle before, she’d never shown a full flare-up for the world to see – and this felt like the perfect time.
“Even though I’ve opened up, I’ve still kept hidden. And when you’re hiding your physical body, there’s so much that rolls over into your emotional and spiritual mental health. You feel like you’re holding yourself back—like you’ve been caged in. Maybe it’s the fact that this year has really put things into perspective, but I now feel like I’m at a point in my life where I just want to break out of that cage,” she wrote.
“We’re at a moment in time right now when we’re all being stripped of everything we thought we needed—and now we can see how worthy and good enough we are without all of the bulls**t. We’re worthy without the makeup and the artifice. We’re worthy of love without having to work for it. And that’s why I’m tired of hiding,” she wrote.
LeAnn called seeing the photos “a sigh of relief” and said it was something she needed.
“My whole body—my mind, my spirit—needed this desperately. I honestly thought these photos were going to be challenging to look at. It’s one thing to see yourself and judge yourself in the mirror; I thought it would be even harder in a photo, which is why in the past I never let people take pictures of me during flare-ups. Being in our own bodies, we judge ourselves so harshly. But when I look at these photos, I see so much more than my skin.”