Christie Brinkley is opening up about her recent brush with cancer, revealing that she was diagnosed with skin cancer on her face by happenstance when she accompanied her daughter to a dermatologist appointment.
Appearing on the Today show, the septuagenarian model explained how she was with Alexa — her 38-year-old daughter with her first husband, singer Billy Joel — earlier this year when the cancer was frist spotted.
“I was in the room, and he had this little magnifying glass out, and he’s looking at a couple of things that she was worried about,” Brinkley said. “I thought, ‘There is that little spot right on the side of my head right here. … Should I say anything? It’s not my appointment.’”
Brinkley said that it was at the last second that she asked the doctor to have a quick peek at the spot. “He looked and he goes, ‘We’ve got to do a biopsy immediately. This is something.’ Then the biopsy came back (as) cancer,” she recalled.
In an Instagram post on March 19, Brinkley had revealed that she had basal cell carcinoma removed from her face, posting a photo of herself with a bandage over the extraction point. In the caption, she explained the procedure and encouraged others to get checked out.
“The good news for me is we caught the basal cell carcinoma early. And I had great doctors that removed the cancer and stitched me up to perfection like an haute couture Dior,” said the fashion modeling icon, who has appeared on over 500 magazine covers over her 51-year career.
Basal cell carcinoma is the most common form of skin cancer. It’s mostly caused by long-term exposure to ultraviolet radiation from time spent in sunlight. It typically begins as a bump on the skin.
Brinkley also thanked a trio of doctors at New York’s Laser & Skin Surgery Center of New York — Dr. Abraham, Dr. Anolik, Dr. Geronemus and Dr. Lloyd Hoffman — in the Instagram post.
Brinkley, who appeared on the cover of three consecutive issues of the annual Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, has embraced her looks as she ages and has called out online haters — which she dubbed the “wrinkle brigade” — or in her words, “people that scan celebrities’ pages, hoping to find some cellulite, wrinkles, or anything that they can point to to critique.”
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