Larra Lasam: The Fire That Forged Her
After surviving a childhood fire that left her with scars across her face and body, Larra Lasam learned that healing begins the moment you stop hiding from yourself.
It’s freeing to watch Larra Lasam enjoy herself.
The 24-year-old motivational speaker and psychology graduate is so bubbly and spirited at the Allure Philippines shoot, her energy bouncing off the walls, that you almost overlook the protruding, hypertrophic scars all over her face and body.
When Lasam was 11 years old, she was caught in a fire at a local festival in Cebu with her younger cousin, Jam, when the flame of the candle they used to light a dark comfort room exploded when it mingled with the fumes from a nearby gas leak.
Miraculously, they managed to escape, with second- and third-degree burns. “When we got out, I found a small mirror,” Lasam tells us, “and I looked at myself in it, with only moonlight illuminating my face. I asked myself, ‘What will my life be after this? What will I look like?’”
First, though, she had to fight a battle between life and death.
Lasam would spend the next three months living in the hospital, heading in and out up to a year after that. After nine operations under general anesthesia to clean the wounds up, doctors explained that they couldn’t administer the anesthesia any longer, because Lasam might not wake up. “So they had to clean our wounds while we were awake,” Lasam shares, describing a whirlpool water machine, a strong jacuzzi with medicated water swirling. “I had to watch myself get stripped off, see my flesh and even some of my bones and my fingers.” But while Lasam was fighting for her survival physically, internally, there was another war going on.
Wilmark Jolindon
As she aged into her teenage years, Lasam, painfully aware that, with her scars and marks, she did not fit into the idealized mold of beauty, grappled with healing—physically, emotionally, and mentally. She would walk down hospital corridors and feel people’s stares, and would always overhear, “Sayang, babae pa naman.” The next seven years were spent covering herself up, “with cloth masks and cardigans, to cover the scars.”
“We live in a very physical world,” she says. “People stare, and it did affect me.” But the cardigans, the masks, it turns out, were not just her way of hiding from others. “It was me hiding from myself.”
Slowly, Lasam learned to shed her cover. “I had a speaking coach for a contest at school, and she asked, ‘Larra, I would not ask you to take your mask off, but I want to ask why you haven’t after all these years?’ I said, ‘People will stare, and see me as ugly or unpresentable.’ And she answered, ‘How did you arrive at that?’ I said, ‘I assumed…’ And she said, ‘Exactly, you assumed.’”
After speaking with others close to her, Lasam realized “that what I thought others thought of me were the things that I thought about myself.” From keeping them hidden, her scars have now become what Lasam says is “a window to which people see me as.” They’ve become leverage, she explains, to tell her story and allow others to get to know her—the true Larra.
The true Larra, Lasam says, “has fun with whatever is handed to her, turning storms into rainbows, unafraid to share the colors with everyone. That’s what I’m trying to do now.” And as she prances through the shoot, chatting up a storm, sharing in laughs—unencumbered by long sleeves or face coverings, and free from any suffocating molds or constructs laid upon her—the sight is beautiful.
Art direction by Nicole Almero. Beauty direction by Ambrosia Concepcion. Makeup by Lala Flores, assisted by Raquel Rocha. Hair by Dale Mallari. Styling by Geno Espidol for Qurator, assisted by Jermainne Lagura.
