Nina Garcia said she felt 'horror' when she tested positive for the BRCA gene, which raises a woman's breast cancer risk by up to 85 percent.
But once it sunk in, the 53-year-old Elle editor and Project Runway judge said she felt 'lucky'.
'I kind of switched, and I was like, "How lucky ... that I was able to know this so early on,"' Garcia told ABC News' Robin Roberts today in her first interview about her preventative double mastectomy earlier this year.
Garcia told Roberts she felt compelled to share her story, particularly as a woman in the preened fashion world, because it's 'very important to stand up and be like, "You know what? We are not perfect."'
Nina Garcia shared her story on Good Morning America because she felt compelled, as a woman in the fashion world, to show 'we are not perfect'
As of 2015, Garcia started getting mammograms every six months, which is more regular than doctors usually recommend, even for people with the BRCA mutation, but Garcia wanted to be sure. Recently, her doctor saw something 'abnormal' and ordered a lumpectomy. That was enough for Garcia
Having a mutated BRCA gene - as famously carried by Angelina Jolie - dramatically increases the chance a woman will develop breast cancer in her lifetime, from 12 per cent to 90 per cent.
Between one in 800 and one in 1,000 women carry a BRCA gene mutation, which increases the chances of breast and ovarian cancer.
Both BRCA1 and BRCA2 are genes that produce proteins to suppress tumours. When these are mutated, DNA damage can be caused and cells are more likely to become cancerous.
The mutations are usually inherited and increase the risk of ovarian cancer and breast cancer significantly.
When a child has a parent who carries a mutation in one of these
