Cara Delevigne refused to hide her psoriasis on the Met Gala red carpet

It’s important to note that psoriasis is a common, long-term (chronic) disease with no cure. It tends to go through cycles, flaring for a few weeks or months, then subsiding for a while or going into remission. Other celebs including Jonathan Van Ness (who opened up about his psoriasis when he posted an un-retouched photo of his body on Instagram), Kim Kardashian, Lala Anthony (who has previously worked on campaigns like the National Psoriasis Foundation‘s Picture Positivity to increase acceptance) and Kris Jenner.

And this isn’t the first time that the youngest Delevigne sister hasn’t let psoriasis stop her from strutting her stuff. In 2013 she exposed a flare on her stomach to reporters backstage at a Paris fashion show, telling them, “It’s all over my body.” She explained that her symptoms flare up “at stressful times when I’m working a lot. You can’t cure it; you’ve just got to go on holiday.”

A few years later, Delevingne revealed in an August 2015 interview with The Times that some coworkers feared that her psoriasis was contagious. “People would put on gloves and not want to touch me because they thought it was, like, leprosy or something,” she recalled.

“I am not doing fashion work anymore, after having, like, psoriasis and all that stuff,” she told The Times. “Modeling just made me feel a bit hollow after a while. It didn’t make me grow at all as a human being. And I kind of forgot how young I was … I felt so old.”

Cara Delevigne’s journey to accepting her skin condition is not only empowering, but an important message to viewers of the Met Gala and beyond that we are all human, we all have parts of ourselves that might feel less desirable at first, but are in fact an aspect of us that should be cared for, celebrated and left unapologised for.

We’re not sure that we’ll be heading out in just gold paint, a pair of stilettos and a cane anytime soon, but we are certainly going to think twice before we cover up our own skin conditions or blemishes. Thanks, Cara – it’s giving self acceptance, it’s giving girl power.