“Nobody’s perfect. Naomi hates her feet. Cindy worries about cellulite. Christy is touchy about her hands. Linda is sensitive about her mouthy. Nadja looks in the mirror and sees nothing special. Charles Gandee listens in as five supermodels rate themselves.

Models, unlike you and me, are not allowed the luxury of self-delusion. Along with banana splits and bad haircuts, it’s an indulgence they cannot afford. Among the many things this explains is why it is that when a model emerges from the shower, she turns up the rheostat that regulates the cluster of 100-watt bulbs illuminating the full length three way mirror she’d be a fool not to have at home, and a bigger fool not to scrutinize with the unforgiving eye of an Olympic judge from Russia scrutinizing an Olympic ahtlete from the States.

Although such unabashed self examination is ofttimes mistaken fror vanity, it is necessity rather than narcissism that compels a model to perpetually update her personal balance sheet of physical liabilities and assets. The reason this is so is that the more intimately acquainted a model is with herself, the better prepared she is to trick the camera into if not out and out lying, at least distorting a thing or two in her favor.

Modeling, it could be said, is a profession that is situated at the intersection of truth and illusion, and the best models know it. Which explains why the besty models know how to tild their heads and their bodies in just such a way that their eyes or their lips or their cheekbones or their breasts or their hips or their legs appear larger or smaller, longer or shorter, higher or lower… younger or older. To be able to perform such sleight of body requires a degree of self awareness that if matched by you and me would rightly be deemed pathalogical. But there’s nothing neurotic about a $25,000 a day mode strip searching herself in the cold, cruel light of day to find out where the five pounds the scale says she picked up eating butter drenched lobsters on St. Barth’s over Christmas ultimately lodged themselves. It’s simply good business.

Contrary to their public image as creatures unmatched in shameless conceit, supermodels - that handful of millionaire mannequins that the Western world is on a first name basis with have been dubbed - are so badly critical of themselves that, at times, it’s almost as if they’re disucssing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a car or a piano or a horse. In fact, dispassionate objectivity is such an ironic constant in conversation with Linda, Christy, Naomi, et al. that the impression they create is that their egos are merely not inflated, but virtually absent.

Perhaps because she earns a reported $7 million per year, perhaps because she snared Richard Gere, or perhaps because she has moved beyond the relatively narrow confines of the runway, Cindy Crawford is a paradigmatic example of a model who is unflinching in her self analysis. “The reason models are so skinny is because clothes look good on really skinny people… They fall in a really nice way,” she offers, then matter of factly adds, “I don’t have a traditional model’s body. I’m much bigger than someone like Linda. I have bigger bones, bigger everything. I’m also more voluptuous. And so sometimes I look better photographed without my clothes on.” (See Playboy, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone).

Crawford is no less candid about the consequences of her bigger everything. “I’m not like Christy, who seems able to look whatever way is in style - she can look waify, she can look glamazon. I think my look is definitely a whole look. So, instead of trying to fight what I am, I try to use it.” (See Capezio, Pepsi, Blockbuster Video, and Revlon ads. See MTV).

What Crawford has in abundance and uses without apology is the kind of time honored feminine allure you don’t see all that often on the runway. She has curves where other models have straight lines. But curves are a high risk enterprise - having, as they do, an unfortunate tendancy to careen out of control. “I started getting serious about working out when I was 23,” she says, now 28, with a little help from the trainer to the stars Radu, who has sold somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 million exercise videos to date. “I had to, basically, or else I wasn’t going to fit into the clothes. I’, not like linda or Naomi, who can eat whatever they want and not work out. I have to work out.”

Since Crawford crows about few things like she crows about being the master of her own physical destiny, it’s no surprise when asked to identify the single feature she is most proud of, she unhesitantly says, “My body. It’s the one thing that I wasn’t just given… It’s the one thing I’ve taken charge of. Whereas my eyes or my face were the luck of the draw. I mean, I was born to be five feet nine and a half inches.”

Justifiable pride not withstanding, Crawford’s body does not escape her scrutiny unscathed. “It’s not like I go to a department store and try on swimsuits and like what I see. I’m like every other woman - ‘Oh my God.’ There’s that area right under my butt where the cellulite tends to come. I think I’m probably self concious of that… and sometimes I’m self concious of my arms because Linda has these little bird arms that look great in clothes. But the thing I like about my body is that it’s strong. I can move furniture around my apartment. I can ride my horse. I can go hiking for two hours. I can play basketball. It’s like a well functioning machine. And it’s that way because I work out.”

At a certain point, midway through our litany of personal flaws, Crawford hesitates and then switches gears, zeroing in on what must surely be counted among the occupational hazards of modeling. “It ‘s just so strange that we have to know all this stuff about ourselves, and that we actually have opinions about things like which hand is nicer,” says Crawford, who then dutifully reports that her left hand is definitely nicer than her right hand because her right hand “has a weird bump on it.” Among the other quirky things she reveals about her imperfect self is the fact that her ears are different sizes, and that her left profile is better than her right profile for still photography, whereas her right profile is better for television.

Such idiosyncracies aside, when asked if there are things about herself she would change if she could, Crawford demurs: “That’s just such a loaded question. It would be so ungracious of me to say, well, I don’t like my feet. It’s like, I can walk on them, so my feet are fine… even though they’re a little wide, you know?”

If Crawford is loathe to fantasize about making creative alterations to herself, photographers and art directors, she reports, have no such compunction. Although the form their criticism takes - photo retouching - is more sneaky than straightforward. “If it hadn’t been for the mole, I wouldn’t have recognized myself,” quips Crawford, pointing to a recent cover photograph of herself that received somewhat more technical attention than she felt it needed. “Sometimes I feel in this business that they take your features away; certain makeup artists do that. They create a blank canvas and then start building up again.”

If a “blank canvas” of a face is an advantage for a model, then Nadja Auermann had a leg up on the competition. “In my point of view, I don’t think I really have features,” offers the Teutonic 23-year-old, without a hint of dissatisfaction. “I have a small nose. I have very simple lips, normal eyes. I think I have a very nice face; there is harmony but it’s nothing extraordinary.”

Since Auermann, not unlike Crawford, is a practical woman, rather than rue the “unremarkable” face fate handed her, she considers it good business. “It’s good because I can be transformed into any kind of person… I can be a girl who is very sexy, or I can be a girl who looks telve.” According to Auermann, the difference between sexy and twelve is, among other things, makeup, or the lack of it, that is on the field of freckles sprinkled across her nose.

Asked if there wasn’t a downside to her chameleon-like mien, Auermann says, “In the beginning, people had problems recognizing me. When I would show my book, people would say, “Oh, that’s you? I can’t believe it.”

The recognition problem ended last year when Auermann turned up one day - Friday, September 24 - with snow white hair. “Although it’s fake,” she says, “I think it represents my character better than my natural hair color, which is dark blonde. This is the color my hair was when I was ten or twelve, so I feel like I’ve returned to myself.” If there is a sentimental side to Auermann’s new hair color, there is also a pragmatic side: “The color is so luminous, it has so much light in it, that it’s just like an attraction - people can’t not see me. So I think that may be why people finally noticed me. With my hair color, at least there is something that is always the same. People can recognize me.”

As for her natural physical distinctions that have served Auermann and her career well, surely the most critical is the extraordinary geometry of her body: “My proportions are rare. I have long legs and arms - very, very long legs and arms. But my torso is short. I’m five feet eleven inches and girls who are five feet nine inches have longer torsos than I have.”

The “abnormal” proportions have been constant with Auermann since childhoodl, although she was then less grateful for the long arms and longer legs she now regards as her “capital.” When Auermann was a little girl in West Berlin, the other little girls dubbed her der Storch, which was not only German for Stork but also no compliment. The cruel sobriquet and its inevitable impact help explain Auermann’s incredulous response long ago to a sibling’s suggestion that turned out to be prophetic. “When I was younger,” she remembers, “My older sister told me I should become a model because I was so skinny. But at that point I thought, ’ I am just ugly and tall and skinny and nothing interesting.’ I always thought Sophia Loren was the ideal woman - sexy, round, voluptuous.”

By seventeen, Auermann had revised her opinion of herself, thanks to a course in fashion design, where she recalls being taught that “a normal bodyt is eight times the size of the head fitting on it, and the ideal body is nine times the size of the head fitting on it, and the body in fashion illustrations is ten times the size of the head fitting on it.” To Auermann’s delight, the one to ten head to body ratio is “exactly” hers. “I look like a fashion illustration.” The revelation made a difference: “From this point on,” says Auermann, “I started to consider my body acceptable.”

If there is one part of her acceptable body that Auermann has particularly positive feelings about, it is her breasts. Contrary to what you might think, the affection is not merely physical, but feminist: “It’s important to accept your breasts, because the first part of her body that a woman criticizes when she doesn’t feel good about herself is her breasts.” And as for Auermann’s breasts? “I like my breasts very much. I’m happy about them. They have a good size. They’re nice.”

What has been a source of anxiety, however, is Auermann’s weight. “When I was young I was eating like a pig,” she says, adding that her appetite was perhaps increased by her desire to attain Sophia Loren’s curves. “So I was continuing to eat like that when I came to Paris to model. But everybody made me paranoid, they told me, ‘Nadja, you can’t eat so much, you have to stop!’ If I gained half a gram, I was completely freaking out.” And was everybody right? “I was a little bigger,” confesses Auermann, “but I don’t think I was huge or fat.”

Everything is under control now, according to Auermann, who wisely notes that “at a certain age, exercise is something you can’t avoid… Around 20, I think, is a good age to start,” she offers, noting that her current regimen includes swimming, a stationary bicycle, aerobics, and weight training with elastic bands. The body consciousness, Auermann believes, is a professional obligation - not unlike the professional obligation she feels “to be well dressed… I mean, I have to keep my image. Also, I think that models are looked upon as ideal women; they’re what people take examples from. So I think it’s good if we keep trying to take care of ourselves. I think we always should try to look kind of graceful.” Which is easier for Auermann “since I am working out and taking more care of my food. I think I am now in really good shape - at the moment, I am happy.” Can it be that Auermann considers herself perfect? “Nobody’s perfect. That’s what makes us interesting. If you’re too perfect, or if you have nothing a bit abnormal, then you’re not beautiful. A perfect beauty is not interesting.”

When asked to rate herself on the proverbial scale of 1-10, Christy Turlington first squirms and stutters and sweats - “Do I have to?” - and then reluctantly toys with “maybe eight,” before finally settling on “seven” which she frets over because it might be too high. “Is seven vain? Does it sound terrible?” Actually it sounds a bit too low, considering how frequently Turlington is referred to as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” or some comparably hyperbolic variation on what has become a stock epithet for the official face of Eternity.

As you may have deduced from the Seven rating, few things make Turlington as uneasy as being reminded of her reputation as a great beauty. “I can sit here and be very flattered, but every now and again I think, How did I ever get into this? Why do people write me or stop me on the street and compliment me? It’s very odd. I grew up with two sisters and I always thought that my older sister was the most beautiful woman in the world. I still do. I mean, I look at my sister to this day, and I see her when she wakes up in the morning and she looks so healthy and beautiful… Why me out of the three of us? It’s just weird.”

As if to illustrate just how weird it is, Turlington unfurls her ever ready laundry list of physicals - no prompting required. “I hate my feet. They’re big and too skinny. I don’t like my hands very much, because I’m trying toi stop smoking, and I bite my cuticles, which is a terrible, terrible, terrible habit. I don’t like my knees very much, not that they’re bad knees necessarily but I don’t like them. Linda has really nice knees. I lose weight in my face very fast and that doesn’t look very nice. I have a bump on my nose - I got hit playing field hockey at school. I have a lot of scars. I had a motorcycle accident five or six years ago, so I have a big scar on the side of one knee. I also have a little scar on my forehead, which they constantly retouch. When I was really young, my sister supposedly dropped me. I have a beer belly.”

Except for the imagined “beer belly” which, when challenged, turlington revises to “a little bit of a tummy,” the self scrutiny appears to be genuine - simple, matter of fact reportag.e Also arguing against a possible charge of faux humility is Turlington’s no less candid and no less detailed recitation of her considerable physical attributes.

“I like the color of my eyes because they’re a strange color, kind of yellow and green. I like my ears. They’re small. They’re flat to my head. I have a pretty thin waist, although it’s not what it used to be. When I was 18, it was about 18 inches. Now it’s probably 24 or 25 inches.”

Although Turlington’s catalogue of personal pluses goes on, and on, when asked to choose the single most important physical asset on her spreadsheet, she doesn’t hesitate: “My lips. They’re my most identifiable feature. For my work, they have been very helpful. i have probably gotten most of my advertising contracts [Calvin Klein, Maybelline, Shisheido] because of them.”

Just as Crawford was once mocked for her mole and Auermann was once ridiculed for her proportions, Turlington’s full lips were a source of shame when she was little. “Children are cruel,” she explains, recalling that period in her life when she “had braces, for an overbite I still have, which made my lips even fuller.” Enlisting the words awkward and gawky to make her point, Turlington adds that “eleven and twelve were probably the worst years of my entire life. On top of everything else, I was a foot taller than all the boys.”

Nowadays Turlington seems to have made peace with herself -with the good, and if not with the bad, then at least with the not so good. Among the things the even-keeled self acceptance is attributed to, of course, is eight years with phenomenal success as a model. “So many women are just so hypercritical of themselves, because that’s just the way society is,” she offers. “I think with me, well, I guess a lot of times I put too much trust in the business because I think, ‘If my butt’s not too big for them to be photographing it, then it’s not too big for me.” Also contributing to Turlington’s comfort of herself is an extraordinary skill in manipulating the camera. “You can do all kinds of stuff with light and with angles, which is great. I definitely know how to make pretty much every part of my body appear different than it actually is. I can make my eyes and my lips appear bigger by putting my chin down. I can make my hips appear smaller. I can make my chest appear bigger - I have had girls grom school who have seen certain pictures of me, and they’ll start saying, ‘Oh, Christy had her boobs done!’ Because I was always really flat. But they don’t realize how you can manipulate everything for photography.”

Still, Turlington has her occasional lapses in confidence. Not long ago, when Irving Penn asked her to sit for a nude portrait, for example, she panicked: “I thought, Oh no, it’s gonna be one of those portraits where they show your flaws… like a picture to run with a story on celluliute or something.” Ultimately, Turlington acquiesced to sitting for the nude - which she now loves, and of which she says now, “I’m not ashamed to show that I don’t have a perfect body.”

It wasn’t always that way. When asked, Turlington confesses that she indulged in a bit of idle speculation about surgically altering this or that about herself over the years. But nothing has ever come of it: “I’ve had times when I wanted bigger boobs or things like that, but I never did anything about it. Now I think it’s much better to have smaller breasts because it just looks nicer when you get older.” It would be interesting to know how large a part Turlington’s modeling career played in prompting her speculative interest in cosmetic surgery. Turlington only hints at it. “Fashion editors can be very cruel. They constantly watch you and say, ‘Oh, look at your ass.’ They do it all the time.”

The issue, and the anatomical point in particular, seems to be on Turlington’s mind these days, perhaps because she now weighs the most that she’s ever weighed: 135 pounds. As for the consequences of the fifteen new pounds she has added to her five-feet-ten-inch frame, Turlington claims, “I am more feminine, more like a woman. I’ve got more of a chest. You can tell when I’m happy by the fact that I’ve gained weight.” Still, the conversation comes round to the object of those cruel fashion editors’ scrutiny: “I think most women hate their butts. I don’t have a real complex about mine, but when I go to the gym, that is what I work on more than anything else. For women, it’s just something you have to work on - unless you’re Naomi Campbell.”

When you ask 24-year-old Naomi Campbell to name the one physical characteristic of her five foot nine and a half inch self that she values above all the others, you have to be prepared to wait - a very long time. Because it takes the statuesque Brit a very long time to decide- having as she does so many, many options to choose from. In fact, with the exception of her feet, there’s virtually nothing about Campbell that she isn’t, shall we say, extremely fond of.

When pressed to narrow the field, however, Campbell finally points not to the one stellar feature but two - a girl’s gotta draw the line somewhere. “My legs and my butt.” Remarkable though these two features may be, some might say that even more remarkable is Naomi’s candor. She could never, ever be accused of the most irritating of a model’s traits: fake modesty.

“My butt is high. I guess that’s from all the years of dancing. I also like the point where my legs meet my butt. In certain pictures, you can see it. It’s quite defined. I have a long torso but I think I’m more legs than anything. I can wear almost anything and it will look good. People say to me, ’ We’ll give you the worst outfit, Naomi, because we know you can make it look good.’ Which is flattering. ALthough i don’t want to be in the worst outfit. But that’s my job and I have to do it. I like my shoulders; I have really broad shoulders and they’re really square, which is good because it’s like a hanger. My face is very animated. My smile is very genuine. My waist is 22. My hips are 33 or 34. I think my body’s in proportion. I don’t have big breasts, but my mother says the best breasts to have are the ones that fit in those old, vintage champagne glasses. I have a little more than that, but I’m happy with them just the way they are. I don’t want ‘em any bigger. i like my button nose. My lips are quite full, but they’re not huge. My forehead, I htink, is in proportion with my face- not too big, not too little. I have longish nails. Christy’s always telling me to cut them; she likes short nails. But I have long fingers, so i feel better with a slightly longer nail, more feminine.”

Less anyone think that Campbell is indiscriminate in her self assessment, she interjects with a bit of qualified praise -

“I have very long arms. I used to walk back and forth, then I watched videos of the shows and realized that my arms just look really silly going back and forth like that. So now I’ve learned to control them. I try to keep them straight down beside me… They’re a little too long, my arms.”

Campbell is no less candid about the fact that she neither exercises nor diets. “I can’t go to a gym and lift weights because I’m already muscular because of dance,” she says. “That’s what I was doing all my life. Ballet formed my body and that’s where my shape, I think, came from. So now what happens is if I work out, my legs get bigger, my quads get bigger.” And as for her fearless attitude towards food? “One day I’m sure I’ll have to be careful, but I still eat what I want.” Aha! But tell us about your feet Naomi. We want to hear about your ugly feet. ‘I have a dancer’s feet. Which I’m going to get taken care of. That’s the only thing.”

When Linda Evangelista looks in the mirror each morning, she does not mutter the smug, self congratulatory mantra “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most phenomenal model of all.” No. What Linda Evangelista says to herself when she looks in the mirror each morning is “Oh God, you’re lucky that you can pull this off.” At least, that’s what she says she says.

“I definitely do not see perfection in the mirror,” reports the mannequin who has reinvented herself more times than Madonna. “I see a crooked face. I see burned hair. I see the truth… I’m a supermodel ,not superhuman.” That being the imperfect case, then what would Evangelista alter, if given the chance? “I don’t dislike anything about myself so much that I’d go after it with a knife,” she claims - adding, however, that the idea is not altogether alien:

“I think I would change my mouth and make it a happy, pouty, sexy, smiley, gorgeous, uplifting, full mouth - not this frowny kind of mouth, which I hate because it’s all crooked and tiny when I close it. Unfortunately you can’t beef up your lips with silicone without it looking like youi did, so that’s why I won’t do that. I want Christy’s mouth. That’s what I want. That’s what everyone wants. I’d change the size of my hands. I’d make them smaller. And the knees [the knees Turlington confesses to being so covetous of] would go. I have the most hideous knees. Hmmm… what else? Oh, I’d remove two ribs… or just shrink the size of my rib cage. And I’d do something to the nose. I wouldn’t mind if it was shorter. People think I’ve had my nose done, but I always say, ‘If I’d had my nose done, I wouldn’t have had it done to look like this.”

Musings of surgery aside, Evangelista would like it to be known that the one time she did go under the knife, she did so for medical reasons, not for vanity. “I had a major lung operation last year. So I have this big, beautiful scar right across my chest. But I accept my scar, all my scars. I accept everything…” Including the good.

“I have nice legs, shoulders. And I really lucked out with my eyes. They’re blue, but my pupils are so enormous that you can never tell the color. ANd I think I have nice arms. They’re very toned. It’s not from the gym, because I don’t work out my upper body; I work on the waist, the behind, the legs. It’s because I have always carried my own groceries, always carried my own suitcases. IAnd I carry suitcases almost every other day. I think that’s why my arms are in such good shape.”

There is, however, one notable exception to Evangelista’s self-revlatory candor - one question that she absolutely, postiviely, adamantly refuses to answer. When asked how much she weighs, the five foot nine and a half inch model snaps: “No comment. No way.”

Along the same self-effacing lines, Evangelista suggests that she owes her modeling career to “hair, makeup, and sometimes a padded pushup bra.” And without the benefit of such tricks of the trade? “I could spend two hours analyzing what I hate about myself, but I shouldn’t complain. I hate to complain. I was dealt very good cards. The mistakes are fine; they add character. Altogether, it works.”

Her “genetic good fortune” notwithstanding, time, Evangelista says, is no longer on her side. “When you’re 18, you glow and you’re perfect and you never went to a doctor in your life. But I’m 29 now and at this point the maintenance is very, very, very high. It couldn’t be any higher. I spend all my free time on maintenance. It doesn’t come naturally to me anymore. And it’s just such hard work. Every day is a battle. I’m fighting everything. I’m talking about the dieting. I’m talking about the working out. I’m talking about health and skin quality. Thank God photographers take more than one frame. Thank God I get more than one chance. And thank God they edit. Sometimes I wish they’d edit a little better… sometimes I wish I could edit.”

Somewhat unsurprisingly, Evangelista then gives herself the once-over from the competitive perspective. “I can’t say I have a gorgeous mouth like Christy. Or a perfect face and body like Naomi. And I’m not a viking goddess like Nadja. And Cindy… well, Cindy’s Cindy. I can’t say I’m any one of those things. I’m not the most beautiful model or the most perfect model, but I’m a good model. I have the will. I love going to work. And when I’m there, I love working with everyone to try and get the best pictures possible. That’s my job. It’s to sell a product or to make an image, and I work really hard at it. I’m a very good clothes hanger.”