Demi Lovato, naked and unretouched: Nude pictures are her way of walking the walk

Demi Lovato has posed nude for Vanity Fair, and the results are unusually refreshing in a world full of no-big-deal naked bodies.

“It was half past midnight when Demi Lovato announced that it was time to take her clothes off,” photographer Patrick Ecclesine wrote in an essay about his session with the 23-year-old whose body-image issues made headlines after she got out of rehab in 2011.

Lovato shed not only her clothes but also her makeup during the shoot. All her makeup, as can be seen in a video [warning: partial nudity] in which she explains her decision to pose nude. The rules were to make it “super-sexy” but with “no makeup, no fancy lighting, no retouching, and no clothing,” she told Ecclesine.

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The pictures, taken in a New York City hotel room, capture a wet-haired Lovato in and around a neutral-toned shower, tub and bed.

“In the past I suffered from eating disorders and I basically went from hating every single inch of my body to working on myself and trying to figure out ways to love myself, love the skin I’m in,” Lovato told Vanity Fair, adding that she was excited to share her new-found confidence with the world.

The photographer said she explained it to him this way: “I’m about to launch an album that finally represents who I truly am. How do I embrace this new chapter in my life? How do I really walk the walk? What does it mean to be confident? It means letting go, being authentic, saying ... this is who I am. I want to show the side of me that’s real, that’s liberated, that’s free.”

The photos, which can be seen on the magazine’s website [warning: partial nudity], definitely play by the rules Lovato laid down.

The results? Super-sexy.

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