On the front cover of Women’s Health, Padma Lakshmi radiates force and strength—as does the seven-inch scar imprinted on her gladly sleeveless right arm; but how did she get her scar?
Padma Lakshmi got her scar after being in a car accident when she was 14, which resulted in her needing surgery to correct what had been damaged and this ultimately caused a scar to form on her arm.
Read more below about the unfortunate story behind her seven inch long scar that sits imprinted along her right arm.
Seven Inch Long Scar
According to the American Academy of Dermatology, “Most scars are flat, and the skin on top tends to look wrinkled. Treatment can make a scar less noticeable.” Scars are your body’s way of healing damage that has been done to your skin, and some are more noticeable than others depending on how deeply the injury has penetrated your skin.
In 2001, Lakshmi composed an individual exposé for Vogue wherein she recalled the tragic moment that her folks’ vehicle jumped off of the freeway, dropping 40 feet into a bank where a tree dampened their fall. She was only 14 and this is the event that caused Lakshmi to receive a lifelong scar.
“The accident happened on a Sunday afternoon filled with sunshine. I was fourteen years old and on my way back with my parents from a Hindu temple in Malibu. The traffic was quite heavy for a Sunday. I remember thinking how strange that was. Then there was a loud bang, and I looked out the windshield and saw nothing but the prettiest blue sky. I thought I was dreaming because I’d been nodding off, but then I realized we were part of that blue sky. Our red Ford Mercury sedan was airborne. Flying in a car felt like an exhilarating hallucination, an unbelievable ride that oddly remains one of the most beautiful images in my memory.”
“We hit a tree dead-on and it stopped our fall. Blood, glass, dirt, and leaves were everywhere. We seemed to have been buried alive.” Upon landing, she and her folks were canvassed in glass and garbage, and hung tight for 40 minutes before paramedics utilized “the jaws of life” to liberate them from the vehicle.
“A helicopter landed in the middle of the highway to take my parents away. An ambulance carried me to the hospital. I finally passed out. When I woke up hours later, I had tubes coming out of several places in my body. My right arm had been shattered and my right hip had been fractured,” she recalled.
A Mark of Survival
At first, Lakshmi clarified that she was excessively hesitant and self-conscious about the scar to the point where she’d developed a position that would hide it when she folded her arms, “When I first got the scar, I was self-conscious about it. I perfected a casual pose that hid it under my left hand and thumb when my arms were crossed.” She wished the specialist would’ve operated from the posterior side of her body.
At the point when she started to model while she was in college, she concealed it with cosmetics and powder, “I never thought I was pretty enough to model, even without my scar.”
Be that as it may, as she became more established, she figured out how to hold onto it as a token of her endurance, and as time went on, she started accepting her scar, describing it as “a symbol of my survival.”
“My attitude about my body has grown and changed and morphed and evolved, as has my body,” she told SELF’s Amy Marturana Winderl in 2016. “It’s what sets me apart and makes me me, and even if someone could wave a magic wand I really don’t think I would choose to eliminate my scar.”