Advertisement

Curvy Blogger Celebrates Turning 30 in Her Birthday Suit: ‘Every Year I Grow Older, I Grow More Fearless’

Carly Stone strips down for her 30th birthday. (Photo: Facebook/Carly Stone)
Carly Stone strips down for her 30th birthday. (Photo: Facebook/Carly Stone)

A woman celebrated turning 30 with cake — and a slice of body positivity.

For her birthday, Carly Stone staged a photo shoot. And, fittingly enough, while the curvy model frequently poses in lingerie and swimwear, she did so in a suit this time around — her birthday one.

Alongside a photo of herself in the buff, flaunting a tattoo on her torso and a beautiful blowout, she wrote, “Instead of thinking about all the ways I could change myself going into this milestone, I chose to show it all in this shoot; embracing the thickness of my thighs, the softness of my stomach, the bend of my backside.”

The photo was posted more than two months after Stone’s milestone birthday as an homage to the acceptance that she’s made toward her own body. Although many people view aging as a negative process, the advocate recognizes that her experiences through the years are what have led her to embrace herself.

“It saddens me that so many people view aging negatively, but I know that at 20, I wouldn’t have had the self-acceptance or confidence to model, let alone pose nude! Every year I grow older, I grow more fearless,” she tells Yahoo Style.

Stone admits that developing the confidence to strip down — and post the images so publicly — hasn’t come easy. She’s developed it over time, and gained even more thanks to seeing models like Tess Holiday and Ashley Graham embrace their bodies.

But, Stone explains, she mostly credits the turning point of embracing her voluptuousness to when she worked as a nurse in a surgical ward. At the time, she says, she was working with patients recovering from cancer-related surgeries, which allowed her to see how important her own body is — regardless of size or what it looks like.

“Many of these women bore extensive scars, including having had body parts removed, such as breasts or reproductive organs — the things that ‘make a woman.’ Despite all the changes, these women were truly brave, worrying less about aesthetics and more about the future of their body’s capabilities,” she says. “They were grateful. Suddenly, I felt silly worrying about my own insecurities because really, what’s a little cellulite or stretch marks in the grand scheme of things?”

After putting on the littlest lace set she could find, Stone says, she never looked back. Now, as she entered her fourth decade of life, she took her birthday as an opportunity to completely unveil her body as a celebration of how far it’s gotten her. “I don’t just want to tell people to love their bodies or to love my body,” she says, “I want us to all be on this journey together.”

Read more from Yahoo Style + Beauty:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. For Twitter updates, follow @YahooStyle and @YahooBeauty.