How Bazaar! Lady Gaga Gets Naked in a New Way

Pop superstar leaves the makeup behind for mag's first black and white cover in 25 years

We've seen Lady Gaga draped in plush frogs, dressed as a dude and covered in meat.

But rarely do we see her like this!

The pop superstar dared to let her face stay bare on the October cover of Harper's Bazaar, a relatively bold move for any celeb, let alone one who usually only steps out dressed to kill (literally, sometimes, depending on the shoes) and wearing enough makeup to mask an entire Cirque du Soleil troupe.

Wanna see?

Presenting...Lady Gaga, au naturel. Or not.

"I don't really view it as 'natural,'" she says in her Bazaar cover story. "I think that artifice is the new reality. It's more about just being honest and sincere to the core of what you do. Whether I'm wearing lots of makeup or no makeup, I'm always the same person inside."

"There's this idea that it's all natural, but everything's been staged to look natural," Gaga says of her daily practice of putting on a show just by getting dressed. "It is also an invention. It's just that my inventions are different. I often get asked about my artifice, but isn't fashion based on the idea that we can create a fantasy?"

"I try to not focus on what people expect from me," she continues. "I think what has been lovely about my relationship with the public is that they expect something unexpected from me."

And what's more unexpected from Lady Gaga than simplicity?