Meghan Markle Spread Freckle-Positivity With a Sweet Phrase That Helped Her Embrace Her Own

Meghan Markle has long been outspoken about embracing her freckles—and is encouraging a young boy to do the same.

While in Whistler, Canada with husband Prince Harry for the Invictus Games on February 10, the Duchess of Sussex spoke to the boy and was overheard telling him, “A face without freckles is a night without stars,” according to People.

It’s a phrase with a deep meaning—and the title of a book Meghan wrote as a teenager. In 1996, Meghan submitted a book called just that—A Face Without Freckles…Is a Night Without Stars—which was written as part of an eighth grade school project and submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office. The book was discovered in 2021 after the 14th Librarian of U.S. Congress Carla Hayden revealed its existence on Twitter.

“Some people think freckles are strange, while I happen to disagree,” Meghan—who would have been 14 or 15 in 1996—wrote in the book. “Because if I did not have freckles, then I would not truly be me!”

The title of the book—which she reshared this week to the little boy—was originally said to her by her father, Thomas Markle, when she was younger.

In 2016, Meghan was asked in an interview with British TV channel Dave what she’d call a children’s book about herself, to which she answered “The Glorious Adventures of Freckle-Faced Meg.”

Meghan has been vocal about her freckles ever since, telling Allure in 2017, “My pet peeve is when my skin tone is changed and my freckles are airbrushed out of a photo shoot.” In 2018, when she married Harry, her makeup artist Daniel Martin used minimal foundation to accentuate her freckles, People reported.

And it’s not just Meghan’s own freckles that she advocates for. When she guest edited the September issue of British Vogue in 2019, photographer Peter Lindbergh said of shooting for the issue, “My instructions from the Duchess were clear: ‘I want to see freckles!’ Well, that was like running through open doors for me. I love freckles.”

He’s not the only one—in his 2023 memoir Spare, Harry wrote about Meghan’s freckles and his fondness for them. After Meghan video called him soon into their courtship, “She’d washed her face,” Harry wrote, adding that he told her, “God, I love your freckles.”

“She took a quick breath,” he continued, telling him, “Every time she was photographed, they airbrushed out her freckles”—a notion Harry found “insane,” he wrote, calling her freckles beautiful.

Read the original article on InStyle