It's easy to forget when watching Miley Cyrus trudging through tropes that were probably best left alone just what a horrible childhood she had.
She reminds us in Marie Claire this month:
Covering the September issue of Marie Claire, the former Disney star opened up to the magazine about how she came to question her physical appearance after years of being "told for so long what a girl is supposed to be from being on that show."
"From the time I was 11, it was, 'You're a pop star! That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair, and you have to put on some glittery tight thing,' " she said. "Meanwhile, I'm this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup. It was like Toddlers & Tiaras. I had f—ing flippers."
I'm presuming here she meant that she had massive tantrums, rather than webbed feet. I think. Although if Disney had decided she should have webbed feet, you can bet that excess skin would have been grafted on pretty swiftly.
Cyrus admitted that she began to develop body-image issues from how she was portrayed falsely on the Disney Channel series, telling the magazine, "I was made to look like someone that I wasn't, which probably caused some body dysmorphia because I had been made pretty every day for so long, and then when I wasn't on that show, it was like, 'Who the f— am I?' "
She added, "When you look at retouched, perfect photos, you feel like shit. They lighten black girls' skin. They smooth out wrinkles. Even when I get stuck on Instagram wondering, 'Why don't I look like that?' it's a total bummer. It's crazy what people have decided we're all supposed to be."
So, having felt this weight, Miley's not going to play along with those rules:
Despite societal pressure, the pop singer told Marie Claire she won't be conforming to traditional beauty standards.
"I'm probably never going to be the face of a traditional beauty company unless they want a weed-smoking, liberal-ass freak," she said. "But my dream was never to sell lip gloss. My dream is to save the world."
Which is both a wonderful sentiment, and also sort-of hard to square with the announcement
last week that Cyrus has signed on for a second run of promotional work with Estee Lauder's MAC cosmetics brand.