eyebrow fashion in period film

[cimorene]

It's funny how period pieces made in different eras often manage to date themselves to when they were made. There were a lot of extremely early-90s visuals in early Granada-ITV Poirot, for example, in spite of its (for the most part) adhering to the letter of period wardrobe, makeup, and hair guidelines.


Beth Goddard as Violet Wilson in Agatha Christie’s Poirot #37, “The Case of the Missing Will”, 1993, in a very 1993 makeup palette

I'd say the biggest or most notable thing that always throws me off is the eyebrows on the women.

Obviously, eyebrow shaping fashion has changed over the decades a good deal, and you can quickly find image references with both photos and drawings going back much earlier than the 1930s.


source: 1930s Beauty and Style – Hollywood Eyes


Equally obviously, not all women in any given decade follow eyebrow shape fashion, any more than they all go for trendy haircuts - some people don't change theirs at all, some people stick with the fashions of their youth, some people are guided by what they think will be flattering to their faces rather than being swayed by transient trends. (I've got a folder of celebrity and fashion photos from the 1920s and another folder of candids from the 1920s, and the differences between the two in hair and eyebrows are sometimes striking.)

But if you look at an ensemble filmed in the 1980s, you'd get a much different distribution of female eyebrows than you would with one filmed today, or in the 1930s. 



Or you could get surprisingly similar solid, mostly-clean dark lines, as in 9 to 5 (1980) and Ocean’s 8 (2018), both via IMDB. (Some variation will likely be evident in closeup.)

For that matter, a party filmed today could be noticeably different in the eyebrow department from a party filmed in 2008 and a YouTube makeup tutorial would definitely be (and among the women reading this, some are puzzled by this entire concept, some are aware of it but dismissive of it, and others are nodding along. Plenty of women out there are more aware of eyebrow fashion than I am - I'm hardly an aficionado.)

It's easy to see why many actresses might be unwilling to drastically change their eyebrows for a role, of course. 


Unlike Zachary Quinto, who has his shaved to play Spock.

They're likely going to be called on for a lot of high-definition photoshoots while promoting the film, or are at least going to film something else. Drag queens typically cover their actual eyebrows and paint on new ones, but that technique might not stand up to HD photography.


source: MakeUp Wednesdays: RuPaul's Drag Race - 22 Queens Of Makeup

Makeup artists can alter the appearance of them without hair removal, no doubt, but there are limits to how far that will go (with HD photography in the mix). It's a little harder to understand why they didn't use these camoflaging techniques on Campion and early Poirot, but there are a lot of things that are technically possible that pre-prestige tv didn't do.

So anyway, when we watched The Mummy (1999) last week, Rachel Weisz's 1930s eyebrows were so right they shocked me. I think I interrupted proceedings to yell about it? I made such a fuss that @waxjism remembered the rant, which is a big deal for her when the rant concerns makeup.






At the time I thought they were the only Extreme That’s So 30s! Brows I'd ever seen; in retrospect, Pauline Moran as Miss Lemon also wears skinny high rounded arches - a style that suits her face well, however, and over-plucked brows weren't unusual in the early 90s. (Also, she hardly did any other film work at all since then.)



Pauline Moran as Miss Lemon in Agatha Christie’s Poirot #34, “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb” (1993) and “The Incredible Theft” (1989)

Weisz, however, definitely changed hers for this role. They were much thicker before The Mummy and went back to being so after they’d had time to grow out, and haven’t changed a great deal since 2004. (They were thin for The Mummy Returns, but not quite as thin.)


Weisz in I Want You (1998), the year before The Mummy


Weisz’s standard eyebrows in The Constant Gardener (2005)

To wrap up, the most recent example of high-budget, impeccably-designed and -researched 1930s costume extravaganza: here’s Daisy Ridley, Dame Judi Dench, and Lucy Boynton in 2017′s lavish Murder on the Orient Express. Dame Judi looks perfect to me. You can see a definite 30s flavor on the young women - Daisy’s eyebrows are clearly artificially thin, Lucy’s are given a clean edge and a rounded arch. They aren’t, perhaps, as period-fashionable as they absolutely could be, but they aren’t out of place.

Comments

[cesy]

Fascinating!