Carrie Underwood Shares Selfie Showing Her Facial Scar Close-Up

Last year, just days after hosting the 2017 CMA Awards in November, Carrie Underwood tripped down the stairs of her Nashville home, suffering a number of injuries as she fell. Aside from the broken wrist for which she needed surgery, she also needed between 40 and 50 stitches on her face.

While the singer shared the news that she had been injured in a fall, she did not share photos of her wounds, and for months she stayed off the radar, refusing to share any photos of her face as she healed. In the interim, she warned her fans that she would look slightly different when she did resurface again, and rumors started to fly that she had faked the fall as a cover up to undergo plastic surgery.

Underwood eventually showed her face again for the first time when she performed at the ACM Awards in April, with very little obvious difference. A recent Instagram post, however, shows the scar above her lip in a stark light.

The shot, which is a throwback to the filming of her music video “Love Wins” from her new album Cry Pretty, shows a close up of her face on the left side, where she needed the stitches.

As People noted, with her hair deliberately pulled back from her face, the scar above her lip is much more visible than she has allowed it to be since the accident.

Underwood also recently spoke to Redbook about the accusations that she was trying to cover up cosmetic surgery.

“I’m on some magazine every other week for something crazy. It’s a little sad because the truth is just as interesting. I wish I’d gotten some awesome plastic surgery to make this [scar] look better. But I try not to worry too much about it. Any time someone gets injured, it looks pretty bad in the beginning, and you’re like, ‘What is this going to wind up like?’ You just don’t know.”

She added that while the scar is glaringly obvious to her, other people have told her they barely notice it at all, something that made her realize people don’t pay as much attention as she thought they would, which she said has been “nice to learn.”

The singer also expressed that as awful as the accident was, it taught her something valuable about the struggles women in general face when it comes to body confidence. She offered up some advice for other women who lack self-confidence, with a reminder that all women are insecure, and that it’s part of being human.

“The first thing I would tell them is that we’re all insecure; that’s just called being human,” she said. “I feel like the most important thing to realize is that even people who seem to be super-confident have insecurities that they are dealing with.”