14 DAY TRIAL // You can’t possibly love celebrity news and gossip and not have heard of the name Amanda Lepore before. The 46-year-old singer, performance artist, and model also happens to be the world’s most famous transgender, and is proud to say she has “the most expensive body on Earth.”
Amanda was born Armand but, she says in a new piece for Into the Gloss, she always knew she wanted to be a girl, from a very young age. Her journey to finally become a woman and then to become the most famous transgender in showbiz was one so difficult and unlikely that even she has trouble believing it at times.
“I knew I wasn’t gay: I liked boys, but not as a boy. I had a woman’s mind,” Amanda writes of her feelings when she was still in high school, before she started being tutored at home at the age of 16.
A friend of hers started supplying her with hormones whilst she played with clothes and makeup and all kinds of accessories. She was an isolated child but that wasn’t the worst part, she writes: what was worse was the fact that her parents didn’t understand and support her decision of getting gender reassignment surgery.
That didn’t happen until she was 19, with Amanda saying that the surgery itself wasn’t the most painful part of the intervention, but rather the dilator you have to use throughout the entire healing process.
“It felt like a knife. It was the most painful thing I had ever experienced,” she writes.
She was already taking hormones and her body had transformed, so, when she moved to New York, she realized the time had come to build herself into the woman she always dreamed of being.
“Rather than emulate the girls I grew up with who made fun of me, I decided I wanted to look like a movie star. It was like an escape. I did so much research, reading books and watching movies about Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, and all of those Hollywood blondes with the [breasts], the hips, and the heels. Everything was so exaggerated,” she writes.
“Marilyn even had plastic surgery in the ‘40s – a nose job and had her hairline done, and it was a total transformation. Not so different than a transsexual, really. She made herself into what she wanted to be. She would do little things, like put cotton under her top lip to make it look fuller. I based my lips on Jessica Rabbit,” Amanda explains.
Lepore’s lips are twice the size of the pair on the popular cartoon character, but the similarity is definitely there.
“I’ve had my [breasts] done, and my lips done, my bottom lip reduced, and my bottom rib broken and pushed in – I think Raquel Welch and Cher did that, too. It’s illegal in the US, but I had it done in Mexico. They break the floating rib in the back and push it in, so there's no scar. Now, I get injections from Dr. Mark Warfel – he can soften your jawline and even your neck,” she continues.
Amanda says much of her time is dedicated to looking good and that she’s so particular about how she presents herself to the world that she does her hair and makeup on her own.
Lepore doesn’t say how much money she’s invested in her body but, if you also consider the maintenance work she must be having done, she’s probably right in saying it’s the most expensive ever.