Lil kim shares epic throw back photos of her skin transformation

Lil Kim told Newsweek back in 2000:

"All my life men have told me I wasn't pretty enough--even the men I was dating. And I'd be like, 'Well, why are you with me, then?' " She winces.

"It's always been men putting me down just like my dad. To this day when someone says I'm cute, I can't see it. I don't see it no matter what anybody says."

But one man saw something in Kimberly Jones: Christopher (Biggie Smalls) Wallace, an overweight, clever and charismatic small-time drug dealer about to reinvent himself as the Notorious B.I.G., the rapper's rapper and a hip-hop superstar. They met by chance--"He was like, 'You're too cute to be able to rap' "--and Wallace asked her to do an impromptu freestyle rap right there on the street corner. "He was sold," Kim says.

And soon she and Biggie were an item, even though he later married singer Faith Evans. After Biggie 

made his deal with Bad Boy Records, she began recording with his Junior M.A.F.I.A. posse, and transforming herself from girl in the 'hood into blue-eyed blonde.

So what was up with that? According to Kim, just what you'd think.

"I have low self-esteem and I always have," she says. "Guys always cheated on me with women who were European-looking. You know, the long-hair type. Really beautiful women that left me thinking, 'How I can I compete with that?' Being a regular black girl wasn't good enough."

And the implants?

"That surgery was the most pain I've ever been in in my life," says Kim. "But people made such a big deal about it. White women get them every day. It was to make me look the way I wanted to look. It's my body."

When Wallace was shot to death in 1997, Kim believed the only man who'd ever really loved her was gone.