Beauty
Plus-Size Model Hit Out At Trolls Who Called Her ‘Ugly’
She seems to be having the last laugh, earning £10K monthly from her curves.
The pressure to stay slim was overwhelming for Danielle Gardiner that she had to join the police force at age 19 as a detention officer. She wanted to really stay fit as she was scared of putting on weight and asking for a bigger uniform. Gardiner spent years trying to be thin but eventually realized that she hated herself for it.
At age 21, she was a size 14 and had thought she looked massive. And just when she fell pregnant at 22, she suffered terrible morning sickness and lost three and a half stones, which took her down to size 10.
While people told her she looked amazing, the model claimed she felt awful and more miserable than ever. After the birth, she started putting weight on again and was a size 14/16.
Within a few years, Gardiner was up to a size 20, and she admitted that her confidence was rock bottom after years of trying to thin. Thankfully, when her son Noah was five, she came across an advert on Facebook for a body confidence workshop run by Miss Curvaceous UK and decided to apply. The workshop taught her to love herself for herself, not how she looked.
Gardiner entered a competition to be Miss Curvaceous UK at the end of the workshop and started sharing pics of herself posing in underwear on Instagram.
She found this empowering and has since been approached by brands including Boohoo, Nike, Missguided, and PrettyLittleThing. Currently, the beauty is also an ambassador for Models of Diversity, a charity campaigning for a wider variety of models in the industry. Gardiner gets sent up to 40 products a week with her influencing career, including clothes, gym wear, and handbags, which she posts on Instagram.
For this, she gets between £350 and £550 per post and £350 for a three-slide story.
As with being confident with oneself comes with being criticized by a few. Speaking to Fabulous, the 33-Year-Old said: “I get paid a fortune for being fat, and I wouldn’t be modeling or have 128,000 followers on Instagram if I was slim. There are so many skinny models, I just wouldn’t have stood out. When I’ve modelled a bikini and shared photos on social media, people have commented that I shouldn’t be wearing that for my size because I’m not little or pretty.”
“I’ve been called a man and told that I’m too fat to be modeling – all sorts. I couldn’t care less because my size is what makes me successful. I would never have made it as a model when I was a size 10.”
The Hornchurch-based claimed she could earn unto £10K on a good month from influencing alone alongside modeling jobs which bring in an average of £15K a year on top of that. She certainly has the last laugh, and in fact, she thinks she wouldn’t earn anywhere near enough money if she were skinny. However, Gardiner, who is single, lives with children 4-Year-Old Leah and 10-Year-Old Noah and adores her curvy figure.
