Country music superstar LeAnn Rimes (LeAnn Rimes Cibrian) posed nude in a photo shoot and penned an essay for Glamour magazine for World Psoriasis Day. The singer-songwriter and actor was diagnosed with psoriasis when she was two years old. The stress of 2020 caused a current flare-up and she wrote that she wants to show everyone that she's no longer hiding it.
"So much of my journey, both personally and within my creations, my new chant record and podcast coming out soon, has been excavating pieces that I've been hiding and bringing them to the light," the country star wrote in Glamour magazine. "It's been and still is a journey of allowing them out and welcoming and reintegrating those fragments back into wholeness. Music has been my gift, and why I'm here. But I want to give a voice to these other pieces of me. And I want to give a voice to what so many other people are going through. This is finally my time to be unabashedly honest about what psoriasis is and what it looks like...You know when you say something you've been holding in for so long, and it's such a sigh of relief? That's what these photos are to me. I needed this. My whole body—my mind, my spirit—needed this desperately."
In her essay, Rimes, who also shared the photos on social media, writes that she previously wore "two pairs of pantyhose or jeans—even in 95-degree heat" onstage to cover up. She said, at times, her "whole stomach would be covered in thick scales that would hurt and bleed."
In her 20s, she found a treatment that cleared her skin. But this year the psoriasis came back.
"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. Suddenly I went from doing what I love, and being surrounded by people, to just hanging around the house in sweats," Rimes wrote. "Stress is a common trigger for psoriasis, and with so much uncertainty happening, my flare-ups came right back."
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Rimes said this year has made her reconsider things and ultimately decide to stop hiding her psoriasis .
"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," Rimes told Glamour. "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 bullshit. 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."
Rimes will release The Human and the Holy, a collection of 12 meditative tracks, on Nov. 20. She'll also launch a new iHeartRadio health and wellness podcast, Wholly Human, on Nov. 30.
Rimes released her debut studio album Blue in 1996 at the age of 13. She'd go on to have hits with "How Do I Live" and "Can't Fight the Moonlight."
In 2011, Rimes married actor Eddie Cibrian.
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