None Of Us Are Made Blemish-Free

Angela Neustatter speaks to Beverley Sky Fulker, who has helped others — and herself — to love their visible facial differences

One of Beverley Sky Fulker’s earliest childhood memories is wishing she could be invisible. Beverley, who was born with a large port-wine birthmark down one cheek, says children at school taunted her with cruel names ‘all day long’, and repeatedly asked her what was wrong with her face.

At just seven years old, Beverley, who is now 38, started plastering her face with thick, greasy camouflage make-up, desperately hoping to disguise her mark. ‘My face looked as if it was covered in mud and I looked very weird,’ she says with a wry laugh, ‘but it was still better than showing my birthmark’.

These days she wears no skin make-up and instead shows the world her pretty face and her florid birthmark with pride. Her moment of transformation came 16 years ago when Beverley saw a TV documentary in which a woman said her life had been ruined by having a disfigured face.

‘I was shocked and decided that wasn’t going to be me,’ she says. ‘I had recently overheard my mother’s friend saying I was a pretty girl but it was such a shame about my mark. The challenge I set myself was to stop seeing my mark as a reason for feeling the world was against me.’

That day, Beverley threw away the make-up and soon afterwards she had the idea of setting up her inspirational website, Love Your Mark. There, she talks about her own experiences and how becoming more accepting of her mark and more open about it had changed the way people treated her. Almost immediately, people from the UK and abroad started to contact her asking for guidance. ‘They told me how pleased they were to find the site and people told their own uplifting stories, which I feature online with photographs.’