"Applicants to the Paramount Motion
Picture School", May 1925.I spent a few hours last night looking through this site, Shorpy.com, which is just a collection of old photographs mostly from about 1860 to 1940. It's a lot of fun. I spent a lot of time looking at the people and you know what I noticed? People were really really ugly back at the turn of the 20th century. Rich and poor people alike... everybody was ugly.
Mrs. Raymond Belmont,
wife of the famous banker
and equestrian (Belmont
Park). He didn't marry
for looks, obviously.
Dec. 1915.I looked at the men and women — well, mostly the women; I'm not a good judge of male beauty — and found them all to be at best average-looking by today's standards. The mill workers and migrant farmers, the debutantes and the actresses, the athletes and the students... all generally unattractive.
Grace Valentine, famous film
actress, 1920.But then, oddly enough, in the pictures that started in the 1940's, people became better-looking. The women looked more feminine with softer features. The men seemed better-looking as well. Could modern medicine, access to better nutrition, and (dare I say?) selective breeding have improved/changed our appearances in a century so substantially?
Ruth Malcomson, Miss America, 1924.I suppose it is possible to say that even though I looked through 600 photographs, and examined several thousand faces — and found the majority of them could be considered "homely" — I somehow got a poor sampling of faces from the turn of the century, but I doubt it. Of course, there were a few pretty faces to be seen as well... but none of them so far above average as to be remarkable (note the photo of Miss America here). Mostly, I think it is safe to say that we are definitely and considerably better looking than we were a century ago.
3 comments:
The standards of Beauty do change over time, though breeding an diet and (only recently though) corrective surgery have changed what is beautiful quite a bit. We are getting 'prettier' and 'prettier year by year (men as well... there are arguments that men are looking more and more feminine the more generations that pass)... is this a good thing, who knows, but we always try and out do our forebearers, go faster, go father be stronger, everything... be prettier is just another thing we get better at.
Makes me wonder what Helen of Sparta looked like however.
Cosmetics have also taken many leaps forward since then. Look at pictures of today of actresses and models without makeup and you don't see the same pretty people you see in the movies, TV and magazines. So it could be said that some of the people in the photos could have looked much better if the had the cosmetics of today. Of course I don't think much could have helped Mrs. Raymond Belmont. :)
I looked past cosmetics (and hairstyles, etc) and of course only a small amount of people today have had cosmetic surgery (for appearances' sake especially). Teeth, skin, hair, body habitus... all that I didn't really pay attention to.
Go to the website and look at the pictures. I picked four photos of people who would have at least had their looks considered partially in terms of their personal value (actresses, beauty queens, wives of wealthy men), but go look at the "every day folks" and you'll see what I'm talking about: Photo after photo of people who in today's world would be considered highly unattractive. And the men too. Like I said in the original post, I really didn't judge the men... but I do know ugly and there were some ugly dudes. There are a lot of sports team photos... and boy, even the college guys who probably came from proper middle class families... all ugly in the harshest sense of the word.
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