Sonali Bendre embraces her bald head, cancer scars in first magazine photoshoot since diagnosis. See pics

Sonali Bendre has shared pictures from her new photoshoot with a magazine, her first since getting diagnosed with cancer last year.

Actor Sonali Bendre has shot for her first magazine photoshoot since getting diagnosed with cancer in July last year. She posed in front of the camera for Vogue India, embracing her cancer scars after receiving treatment for almost six months in New York.

Sonali Bendre was diagnosed with cancer last year in July.

Sonali shared her pictures from the shoot on Instagram. “The idea was almost preposterous. An almost bald head, barely any make-up and a huge scar was not the norm for @vogue. But, I guess that’s my new normal. Of course I had my reservations, and, if I dare say, insecurities - but a candid conversation with the lovely ladies @priya_tanna and @anaitashroffadajania cleared my doubts. And before I knew it, I was standing in front of the camera, ready to uncover my new reality. The icing on the cake was the fact that I needed one-third of the time for hair and make-up. So I closed my eyes and jumped into it, full throttle, and this is the result. Thank you, @meghamahindru for telling my story; and thank you @ridburman for understanding my story and saying it so beautifully through your lens. If there’s a piece of advice I can give you all after this, it would be to ‘Find your new normal’. It’s very liberating,” she wrote.

More pictures from the shoot were shared on the magazine’s Instagram handle. “I’m okay with it now… I don’t even miss it,” Sonali said about her bald head. “Yet it (my hair) was the be-all, end-all of my life. It was this stupid thing that I was hanging on to,” she said. “My instinct was to wear a cap, a scarf or a wig—but these things are so ugly. I knew that if I had to accept it (going bald), I had to put a picture out there. Because once you share it on social media, you can feel the release,” she said.

In the pictures from the shoot, she is seen in frilly yellow gown, a pristine white shirt dress, beige cardigan with a hairband and more. Check out her pics.

The 44-year-old actor was diagnosed with high-grade cancer last year and had to undergo treatment in New York. She returned home in December and has resumed work.

Sonali had kept her fans in loop on social media about the various struggles she faced during her battle with the disease and she said it was important to be honest with people about what she went through, including the pain.

“I wanted to be charge of my narrative from the start. When you are a public figure, there are so many narratives that it out there. And suddenly you lose hold of that narrative very quickly. It becomes a different thing all together,” the actor said at the India Today Conclave 2019.

“As I went through the process, I realised that there are so many others that would be going to through it. I wouldn’t be honest that if I said, ‘Everything was sunshine’. It was not, it was painful and you do have to go through it,” she added.

Sonali said like many others, she also encountered pain and had many low phases and she learned that one can do nothing but to deal with it.

(With inputs from PTI)

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