Six months after a freak fall left Carrie Underwood with facial injuries that she feared would leave her looking “a bit different,” the country superstar on Monday debuted her new music video for her song “Cry Pretty.”
The video is emotional, powerfully performed and, among other things, it continues to draw attention to her face, including to how she apparently doesn’t look that different after all.
The video finds the 35-year-old Underwood crying in the shower, or in front of a mirror, her cheeks streaked with mascara. She then wipes away the mascara and mounts the courage needed to return to the stage, all while she belts out such lyrics: “You can’t hide it, you can’t fight what the truth is.”
Underwood debuted the song at the 2018 ACM Awards in April. Much was made of the singer’s first public appearance at the awards show since the “freak, random” accident in her Nashville home Nov. 10. In the fall, she broke her wrist and injured her face, requiring 40 to 50 stitches.
Following the accident, the “American Idol” alum had warned her fans that she wasn’t “looking the same.”
In a January letter to her fan club, she wrote: “I want you all to understand why I might look a bit different. I’m hoping that, by then, the differences are minimal, but, again, I just don’t know how it’s all going to end up.”
From Underwood’s description, she sounded like she was confronting what could certainly be a traumatic event for an entertainer whose personal appearance is part of her brand. Over the next few months, she wouldn’t bare her full face to cameras. She also kept selfies and photos of herself to a minimum, suggesting that she would in fact look different.
But most who watched Underwood’s much-hyped appearance at the ACM Awards thought she looked the same — as stunning as ever. They couldn’t detect any signs that she had been scarred or otherwise disfigured in the accident.
Perhaps she had really good surgeons, or the injuries weren’t as disfiguring as she imagined. Perhaps she has really good make-up people, or perhaps the reason that Underwood has continued to make an issue of her face is that she’s more sensitive to any changes in her appearance, given that she’s a celebrity.
In any case, her song, her video and her recent interviews make it clear that Underwood has more to say on this issue and will continue to make her facial injuries and her accident a theme in her work and her public persona for the time being.
Meanwhile, Carrie looks beautiful, even with all the running mascara, in her “Cry Pretty” video, as she belts out: “I’m pretty good at keeping it together/I hold my composure, for worse or for better/So I apologize if you don’t like what you see/But sometimes my emotions get the best of me.”
