Ashley Graham Shows Some Love to Her Postpartum Stretch Marks

Ashley Graham Shows Some Love to Her Postpartum Stretch Marks

The model and mom to 9-month-old Isaac shared an up-close look at her stretch marks

Ashley Graham is feeling the love for her postpartum stretch marks.

The model and mom to son Isaac, who will be 9 months old on Friday, shared a video in appreciation of the marks that live on her stomach.

In the video, Graham, 32, moves her hands into a heart shape over her stretch marks.

She captioned the video, posted on Instagram, with a simple rainbow of heart emojis: “💛🧡❤️💚💙💜”

Graham has proudly shown her stretch marks on social media many times before, both pre- and post-pregnancy. Back in 2017, the body-positive model shared photos from a nude photoshoot for V magazine, including one of the stretch marks on her lower back. Graham said that she credits her mother for teaching her to love all parts of her body.

“I remember my first signs of cellulite, in middle school. I remember telling my mom ‘Isn’t it disgusting? It’s so ugly.’ She pulled her pants down and said, ‘Look, I have it, too. And I was like, ‘Gasp!’ ”

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“She looked at me, then at it, and just rolled her eyes,” Graham told the magazine. “She didn’t tell me that it’s beautiful or ugly. She just made it a nonissue.”

And in August 2019, soon after announcing her pregnancy, Graham posted a nude selfie of one side of her body, which she captioned, “Same same but a little different.”

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Her post led to an overwhelming — “in a good way” — response from her followers, both famous and not, who sent Graham photos of their own stretch marks.

“I just wanted to say thank you so much for posting all of your stretch mark pre-and-post pregnancy photos — whether you’ve had a baby or not it’s truly inspiring,” Graham said in a video a few days later.

The Swimsuits for All designer explained that she decided to share the photo after having a bad day.

“I thought, ‘You know what, I’m just going to post this and I know there’s another woman out there who’s feeling the same way I’m feeling who might be going through kind of a rough day in how she looks and how her body is changing,” she said.

And in July, after Isaac’s arrival, Graham made sure to keep her stretch marks in the photos of her latest Swimsuits for All collection.

"There's always a question of ‘What do you want us to retouch, and what do you want us to take out?’ And I said, 'Nothing’, ” except from a clamp holding up the DIY backdrop," she told PEOPLE. "I want everybody to know genuinely... I want people to see who I am because everybody has a story."