Over the past month, Cara Delevingne’s hair cycled through increasingly shorter stages as she went from lob to bob to pixie to shaved head. And while the impetus for her transformation was her upcoming role in Life in a Year, she’s fully owning the change off-camera and using it to point to the problem with how society still views beauty. On Monday night, she arrived at the Met Gala and put the focus firmly on her lack of hair by covering her head in a swirl of metallic silver paint and starlike sequins.

Today, the model and actress took to social media to further elaborate the point behind her celebratory, bald-headed appearance, posting a duo of pictures with her newly shaven head. “The more we embrace who we are as people and rely less on our physical attributes, the more empowered we become,” she captioned one of the posts. “Beauty shouldn’t be so easily defined. It is limitless.” In the second image, she continued: “Its exhausting to be told what beauty should look like. I am tired of society defining beauty for us. Strip away the clothes, Wipe Off the make up, cut off the hair. Remove all the material possessions. Who are we? How are we defining beauty? What do we see as beautiful?”

Throughout her career, Cara has always been very vocal about the importance of loving yourself. Her most recent posts have clearly resonated with her followers, who commented back with responses like “respect” and “you’re limitless.” Cara’s words are an important reminder of two things: that society does continue to perpetuate restrictive standards of beauty — and that we should never stop working to push back against them, both for ourselves and for others. While her cut may have seemed like a simple decision at first glance, it’s more than skin-deep — and she just pointed that out in the most inspiring way.

Related: The Beauty Evolution of Cara Delevingne, from Model-on-the-Rise to It-Brit Icon

[“Source-teenvogue”]