Ever Evolving Beauty

If you lived in Queen Elizabeth’s time, being beautiful meant covering your face with white paint, wearing your hair taut against your head, and completing the look with a starched ruffle the size of a tire around your neck.

The Egyptian queen, Cleopatra cut her bangs blunt across her forehead and used blue eye shadow, which made the men of her time swoon. A coin that boasts her image shows that she had a sharp nose, thin lips and a protruding chin.

Beauty is in the eye of its era. Dutch women in the seventeenth century were adored for having multiple chins and a wide girth. For Russian women in the eighteenth century, ladies of style dyed their teeth black and dotted their faces with beauty marks in the shapes of stars, horses and trees.

Marie Antoinette and other women of the court donned poufed and powdered hair and bright red circles of rouge to distinguish between them and the commoners.

More recently, in the twenties, Clara Bow (from the 1927 film It ) had sleekly bobbed red hair and she ushered in the era of the flapper. The wars of the thirties and forties, people escaped to watch the chiseled magnificence of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. This began a passion for tweezed brows, dark lipstick and hair spray.

This artificial Hollywood look lost its luster and was replaced by the natural beauty of icons like Audrey Hepburn.

In the sixties, very thin models like Jean Shrimpton, Penelope Tree and Twiggy ignited a spirit of self-expression.

Beverly Johnson became the first African-American model in 1974, which opened the way for more dark-skinned beauties. In the eighties, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista became super models because of their extraordinary beauty.

Then came Cheryl Tiegs who started the era of “anything goes”. The mold was broken and there is currently a wider diversity of beauty accepted. Models or movie stars with a brain has become the new beautiful. Nowadays, it usually takes more than just looks to impress.

According to askmen.com, beauties like Eva Mendes, Megan Fox, Marisa Miller, Keely Hazell and Anne Hathaway topped the list for 2009. Those who participated in the selection of these women were asked to look beyond beauty and sex appeal to pick women who have the features they value in a potential companion, such as intelligence, charisma, humor, and ambition.