Advertisement

Iggy Azalea Might Like Her Moles (But 'SNL' Apparently Doesn't Agree)

Apparently Saturday Night Live didn’t think they were beauty marks.

The show removed musical guest Iggy Azalea’s moles from the pictures they showed of her during the broadcast — and the singer responded that she wished they hadn’t.

“I loved the promo pictures but I wish they hadn’t photoshopped all my moles off my face (hey, I like those things!!),” Azalea wrote on Instagram after her SNLperformance.

Her fans agreed. On Pinterest, a user named Tormented Sugar put up a digital image of Azalea with the birthmarks reinstated.

“Put back the moles on iggys face snl shopped out….” she wrote. “Moles are beautiful! My daughter has 3 on her temple she HATES. I remind her Marilyn and Iggy have moles…our 2 fave blondes.”

While SNL’s reason for removing Azalea’s moles is unclear, the late night comedy show’s promos and interstitial stills on commercial breaks have historically been done in a very blown out manner. Photos of various musical guests and celebrity hosts such as Katy Perry and Anna Kendrick have undergone the same heavy-handed digital manipulation as the Australian rapper. Because these images receive such a highly saturated treatment, it’s possible that the 24-year-old’s moles could have been distracting. 

Marilyn Monroe, in fact, used to draw attention to the mole near her mouth by darkening it with makeup — and it was usually called a beauty mark in the icon’s case. Cindy Crawford, too, is distinguished by her chic mole, and there are a slew of beautiful women who have a dark dot or three, like Blake Lively, Rachel McAdams, Kate Upton, Eva Mendes, Kate Winslet, and Angelina Jolie.

Eva Mendes told People she used to get teased about the mole on her left cheek. ”In junior high the other kids would say, ‘You’ve got some chocolate on your face,’ and I fell for it every time,” she said. ”I said, ‘The minute I turn 18 I’m going to get that mole removed!’ But I’m happy I didn’t.”

Azalea’s not alone in having her birthmarks digitally manipulated. Celebrities’ moles have routinely been erased from magazine covers. In 2008, the mole above Jolie’s eyebrow went missing on the online cover of Entertainment Weekly (but was visible in the print edition). Rolling Stone removed Katy Perry’s moles from her neck in the August 2010 issue. And even Crawford hasn’t always been immune: Her mole was removed on her first Vogue cover.

Hilariously, Kristen Stewart once had a beauty mark added to her face for the April 2010 cover of Slovakian magazine, EVA.

But some celebrities haven’t been as attached to their moles as Azalea. “I didn’t have strong feelings,” Sarah Jessica Parker told David Letterman about having the mole on her chin taken off. ”I didn’t object to it,” she said. “I just didn’t care for it. And I had about six free days when I could be bloody and stabbed and no one will care and honestly I didn’t think a thing about it.”

However, soon after the procedure, Parker told Letterman, a woman came up to her, upset that she had gotten rid of what the woman called her “signature.”

"I was like, ‘My mole was my signature? Isn’t my brain my signature?’" she said. "For about the next 15 minutes I couldn’t hear anything because I thought I’d make a terrible mistake. Can they put it back on?"