Meghan Markle reveals she couldn’t audition for beauty ads due to this facial feature

Meghan Markle opened up about her famous freckles.

On the latest episode of her podcast “Confessions of a Female Founder,” the Duchess of Sussex, 43, got candid with guest and It Cosmetics founder Jamie Kern Lima about past challenges in the beauty industry in Hollywood.

“That would have been when I was an actor, auditioning for commercials,” Markle reflected. “And I remember my commercial agent could not submit me for beauty or skincare ads because I had freckles.”

The royal continued, “They’re like, ‘No, no, no, no. It’s just never gonna work because freckles aren’t a sign of beauty.’”

Markle added, “You couldn’t see yourself reflected there,” referring to the beauty standards early on in her career.

Lima spoke about her reasoning for launching It Cosmetics in 2008, saying, “What if I could launch a business where I put real people as models? Every age and shape and size and skin tone and skin challenge.”

Markle responded, “And that was such new thinking then, when you were bringing that to market.

Now it may seem more normalized. People listening now will be like ‘Well yeah of course,’ It was not an ‘of course.’ It was a revolutionary way to think about makeup and beauty at the time.”

Now, Markle is embracing her natural beauty, even going makeup-free on Lima’s own podcast earlier this week, with the host and Markle’s friend joining her in the laid-back look that included sweatpants.

In a previous episode of her podcast, the duchess discussed her body image as it related to hair while in college.

“When I was at Northwestern and I moved into Kappa [Kappa Gamma], our sorority there, I don’t even think they made plug-in flat irons at the time,” she said in the episode. “If they did, I didn’t know where they were because I had the little stove with the flat iron that would go in and have a paper towel on the side.”

She continued, “And I remember most of the girls in the sorority — who were not black — saying, ‘What’s that smell? Is hair burning?”

“And it was just what you would do to figure out how to grapple with this texture of hair,” she explained.