The mother of a one-year-old girl who has a port wine stain on her face has shared sweet images of her daughter putting glittery makeup on the birthmark to ‘make it shine’.
Beauty therapist Marianna Bowering, 27, shared the wholesome photos in a Facebook group, showcasing her little girl Angelica’s unique charm.
‘This is a bit of a different post but my daughter loves playing with makeup… so today we got out my Morphe “Such a Gem” palette and their Brow Highlight Stick and glittered her birthmark,’ the Adelaide-based mother said.
‘She absolutely loved looking at it.’
Thousands of makeup enthusiasts ‘liked’ the post and others, who also have birthmarks, spoke about how embracing the facial feature was the best thing they’d ever done.
‘I have a dark brown birthmark on the side of my face. I fell in love with it after years of bullying when I spoke to a holocaust survivor that came to talk to us at school,’ said one woman.
‘She told us a story of a woman who lost her little girl during the war who also had a birthmark on her face. She walked past her daughter many years later and saw the birthmark on her face and knew it was her. They were reunited because of it.
‘I hope she grows up knowing how truly beautiful and unique she is.’
‘What a beautiful way to teach her self-love at a young age. Way to go mumma’ said another.
A third added: ‘Mine runs the length of my right arm and I feel like I can appreciate this post a little deeper than most’.
Marianna is a long-time advocate of promoting acceptance of her child’s birthmark after receiving a number of cruel comments about it.
Some people suggested that Angelica had her face ‘pushed into a skillet’ and would find it extremely difficult to ‘find a boyfriend’ when she was older.
But Marianna is confident that her ‘strong’ girl will have nothing but confidence as she grows older and the understanding of the general public will increase.