This 26-Year-Old Model With a Rare Skin Condition Is Your New Body-Positive Hero

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For all the fuss we make about taking care of our skin—and all the money we drop on cleansers, moisturizers, serums, and creams—we all have a pretty good idea of what the outcome will be. Aging is inevitable and nothing to be ashamed of, and having “perfect” skin isn’t what makes you beautiful. Sara Geurts, a 26-year-old model, knows that. She’s shattering the idea that you need to have smooth, taut skin to look and feel gorgeous.

Geurts has a rare skin disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), which affects connective tissue and slows down collagen production, making skin fragile, wrinkled, and less elastic at a much earlier age.

“In high school I just tried to cover it up. I didn’t want anyone to ask me questions about it. I didn’t want to talk about it,” she told British newspaper The Sun. After years of hiding her skin, she’s finally embracing her body through modeling. Geurts started in 2015 after submitting her story to the Love Your Lines campaign on Tumblr, where she received a ton of support and thousands of positive comments. Looking back, she said she wishes she’d never felt ashamed.

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“My lines make me, me,” she wrote in an essay for The Mighty. “Each line holds beauty, and is beautiful in its own way. No one else carries the exact lines I have, and this is what I consider to be truly beautiful.” Geurts wants to encourage other people to love what makes them unique instead of covering it up or trying to change it. “My main aspirations for modeling would be to break society’s standards and the mentality they have for perfection. And to really show that it is your imperfections and your uniqueness that is the true beauty and that’s what needs to be celebrated,” she said.

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Now she’s working toward becoming a face of EDS to help more people understand the disorder. “We are in the generation of albinism models. We have melanin models. We have vitiligo models. We have plus-size models. And those are all fabulous things,” Geurts said. “But the one thing that we are really missing are people with disorders within our everyday commercials.”

By putting herself out there and helping others with similar experiences feel seen, she’s already making a huge difference. Someone please sign her to a skin care campaign, stat.

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