20 thoughts on “Versailles: All the Hair, Some of the Accuracy

  1. Why are all actresses dark brown, when on the paintings the queen and others are blond or light brown too? Is blond the new cuss-word in tv shows recently??? They should had made the queen more chubby and slightly “ugly” as she was, it’s slightly unbeliavable for a man to cheat on a such beautiful wife! (Ok, we all know men, but WTF???)

    1. Henriette is dark blonde, and Louise is a red head:)

      You know TV; Spanish=Dark, so of course they wouldn’t let María Teresa keep her blonde hair;)

      1. Yes, and I wonder if it’s partially to make Henriette stand out, given that she seems to be #1 in Louis’s bed? Although how that will work long term, I’m not sure.

      2. I LOATH that tv trope!!! Apparently all Spaniards must be of Andalusian heritage with Moorish blood. Never mind that the Spanish Royal family were Hapsburgs and were known to be light skinned strawberry blonds and had a horrible underbite.

  2. Going slightly off-topic here, but is it just me or do those two portraits of Henriette look like completely different women? Also, I wish more period pieces hired actors and actresses with softer features (like Rachel Hurd Wood, for example) instead of the sharp-cheekboned beauties of our time. When put next to each other the differences between how these historical characters actually looked and how the actors look seem just too jarring.

    1. Agreed! This was an era when a soft chin was particularly thought of as beautiful, which is SO different from our modern beauty ideal.

      1. re: soft chin = beautiful

        Taking that at face value, do we think it was possible that the various artists ‘flattered’ their subjects my actually exaggerating their ‘soft chins’?

        1. Yeah, I suspect many artists did that. But I also expect many of these pampered upper class people really had softer chins than most of today’s celebrities, because that would be the beauty ideal they were striving toward, just as today’s people are striving toward zero-fat bodies with cheekbones that could cut glass if they can afford it. For my part, I think something in between like the slim yet rosy-cheeked figures from a Millais painting would be a good compromise on screen.

    2. Thank you for confirming my impression that the “modern” faces of these actresses are so wrong.

    3. The left portrait of Henrietta is an English portrait and the right one is a French portrait. They’re painted about 10 years apart (also it doesn’t help that the right one was painted posthumously). It really highlights the different standards in French and English beauty

  3. I feel like I need to add an addendum to my own post, because I really should FREAK THE FUCK OUT (happily) that they are actually PUTTING THE ACTRESSES’S HAIR UP. HALLELUJAH!

  4. From a purely aesthetics point of view, I love Louis and Philippe’s pretty pretty princess hair. Its so glossy and bouncy. I also really appreciate the fact that all the women’s hairstyles look like they were done by and for different people while still forming a fairly coherent overall style.

  5. Excellent reportage! I hit the pause button just to research hairstyles of that time, as some looked a bit 18th century to me. You caught that

  6. I never thought I’d find ye old hairstyles so interesting. Now I’m curious – how on earth did they get and keep those curls back then? Wigs? Or was there a lot more African DNA in royal and aristocratic families than just that of the Queen’s little friend?

    1. If their hair was straight they would curl their hair. Possibly using rag curls or finger curls. I don’t know if they had curling irons back then, but it’s possible. Natural Caucasian curls are not as tight, more like ringlets, and tend to be some variation of blonde or red. Royal and noble European families tended to intermarry a lot, which meant they married distant cousins or cousins. Sometimes they would marry someone completely different, but usually marriage was for diplomatic reasons.

  7. I appreciate your analytics about the true history about the hair/wig’s of men. Thank you for share with all the people who loves the details of truth.

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