Selena Gomez is beautiful exactly as she is – and she wants her 193 million Instagram followers to know it.
The 28-year-old pop star shared a photo Thursday in which she is wearing a swimsuit that exposes a surgical scar at the top of her right leg.
“When I got my kidney transplant, I remember it being very difficult at first showing my scar,” Gomez admitted in the caption. “I didn’t want it to be in photos, so I wore things that would cover it up.
“Now, more than ever, I feel confident in who I am and what I went through...and I’m proud of that.”
It was three years this month that Gomez revealed that she received a kidney transplant from her friend Francia Raisa. “She gave me the ultimate gift and sacrifice by donating her kidney to me,” she said at the time.
Gomez later said there was a frightening complication during the surgery – her new kidney had “flipped” inside her. “It was a six-hour surgery that they had to do on me,” she recalled on Today, “and the normal kidney process is actually two hours.”
The singer-actress was diagnosed in 2015 with Lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease that causes the immune system to attack healthy tissue.
In Thursday’s Instagram post, Gomez models the one-piece swimsuit from La Mariette that bears her name. It sells for $120 U.S.
"Congratulations on what you’re doing for women," she wrote, referring to the brand’s co-founder Theresa Marie Mingus, "launching @lamariette whose message is just that...all bodies are beautiful."