Back in November Carrie Underwood tripped on her front steps. The fall was a bad one; she broke her wrist and had to get 40 stitches in her face. Weeks later, Underwood announced to her fans that the accident had changed her appearance. "When I am ready to get in front of a camera, I want you all to understand why I might look a bit different," she wrote.

The event led to some strange media coverage about when she would make her big "face reveal", and when Underwood did appear in front of a camera again—at the Academy of Country Music Awards in April—looking pretty much the same, it led to some even stranger speculation. One of the biggest (and most problematic) rumors: That her story about falling was just an elaborate cover-up for work Underwood may have gotten done.

Now, nine months after the accident, Underwood sat down with Redbook to talk about how the fall changed her life and, well, didn't change her face. "Anytime someone gets injured, it looks pretty bad in the beginning, and you’re like, ‘What is this going to wind up like?’ You just don’t know,” she said. “It was also a perception thing, because I look at myself [now] and I see it quite a bit, but other people are like, ‘I wouldn’t have even noticed.’ Nobody else looks at you as much as you think they do. Nobody notices as much as you think they will, so that’s been nice to learn.”

Underwood also addressed the nasty rumors that wound up circulating online that her injury was just a "cover-up" for facial plastic surgery. Spoiler: It wasn't. “I’m on some magazine every other week for something crazy,” she said. “It’s a little sad, because the truth is just as interesting. I wish I’d gotten some awesome plastic surgery to make this [scar] look better." Instead, she spent a few months out of the spotlight recovering: "Life is full of ups and downs, and I might have had a few more downs than ups last year."