We all have one. You know what I’m talking about. We all have one body part that makes us self-conscious more than anything else. Apparently, Queen Elizabeth II was no different. Although Her Majesty was one of the most photographed people in the world, she still didn’t want people to see her hands.
When many of us think of the late monarch, we picture her in a dress, hat, and her famous gloves. Apparently, the gloves were more than just a fashion statement for Her Majesty. They helped to cover the one body part that the queen often hid in pictures.
Just how much did Her Majesty dislike having her hands photographed? In a recent interview on the podcast Tea With Twiggy, the British photographer Rankin shared a time when Queen Elizabeth refused to take a picture with a sword because her hands would be exposed.
‘I Don’t Like My Hands’
Even though the experience happened 20 years ago, the photographer remembers it well. In fact, Rankin said that he felt a “wave of empowerment” when Queen Elizabeth entered the Throne Room for the 2002 photoshoot.
Rankin recalled that he thought a picture of the queen holding a sword would be brilliant. “I was like, ‘I really want to photograph you holding the sword,’” Rankin recalled.
“And [Queen Elizabeth] said, ‘I don’t like my hands.’ And I was like, that’s the best get out for holding the sword.”
The celebrity photographer was one of only ten photographers invited to the queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002 to take a picture of Her Majesty. Although the queen turned Rankin down for one picture, she did allow him to take more pictures at the time.
In fact, Rankin was later contacted by Buckingham Palace to let him know that the picture he took of the queen was one of their favorites because Her Majesty was smiling so much.
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According to Rankin, it was no accident that Queen Elizabeth II is all smiles in his portrait of her. The photographer wanted to capture the queen’s sense of humor after he saw her laughing with her footman.
“I was in the throne room and she was walking down this corridor and I could see her and the footman walking,” Rankin said. “They were both laughing, just cracking up, and I was like, ‘That’s what I want.’ So that was in my head the whole time.”
The story just goes to show that no matter our status or level of fame, we all have our insecurities.