The surprising face type these iconic Disney villains all share

Do you have what is, according to Disney movies, the most villainous face type? Or do you have the type that Disney calls the fairest of them all?

With its straight sharp lines, the Dramatic style essence can easily appear intimidating. So when I started typing iconic Disney villains, I expected them to have dominantly Dramatic faces. Surprisingly, that’s not what I found.

Instead, I discovered that 5 of the most famous female Disney villains all have the exact same style type with the exact same dominant style essence.

To make it even weirder, the 5 female protagonists in these movies all share the same dominant essence and same style type—a type that’s opposite to the type of the villains.

Find out if Disney thinks your style essences make you look more like villain or princess.

The Evil Queen’s stype type

As noted, I initially guessed that Disney villains would have faces mostly characterized by straight Dramatic lines.

But confronting the first villain, we see her face is composed almost entirely of curves. The Evil Queen’s extremely arched brows, heavy-lidded curvy eyes, somewhat small nose with visible nostrils, and voluptuous lips are most characteristic of the Romantic essence. And when I systematically compare her face to different styles of clothing, which is most harmonious?

Romantic. The Evil Queen also has some otherworldly Ethereal and intimidating Dramatic, but she’s dominantly the passionate, glamorous Romantic essence.

Maleficent

Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent is very similar to the cartoon version’s, and both Maleficent’s faces have high similarity to the Evil Queen’s—arched brows, large curvy eyes, large full lips, and a hairline/headpiece-line that, like the Evil Queen’s, quizzically resembles a heart.

A heart is one of the defining shapes of the Romantic essence, and like the Evil Queen, Maleficent is a dominant Romantic with smaller amounts of Ethereal and Dramatic. (Plus Classic for Angelina Jolie—but cartoon Maleficent’s face is way too unique to bring in any Classic!)

At this point, wanting some variety, I decided to type a Disney villain who I assumed wouldn’t be Romantic Ethereal Dramatic.

Ursula

But apparently I misremembered what Ursula looked like, because studying her face, we see more of the same: arched, intensely rounded brows, heavy-lidded curvy eyes, full curvy lips, and a rounded and pointy, heart-shaped hairline. Like the Evil Queen and Maleficent, Ursula’s face contains primarily large curving shapes.

And like the Evil Queen and Maleficent, Ursula is most harmonious in glamorous fashion—she’s a dominant Romantic with smaller amounts of Ethereal and Dramatic.

The likelihood of a fourth iconic villain having the exact same style type as the first three is exceedingly low—there’s 63 different types, after all—so based on probability, our next typing almost definitely won’t be Romantic Ethereal Dramatic.

The Wicked Stepmother

But we’ve seen this face before—like the others, The Wicked Stepmother has arched brows, heavy-lidded round eyes, curvy lips, and a heart-shaped hairline. She’s a Romantic Ethereal Dramatic with dominant Romantic.

Can we go 5 for 5? It’s ridiculously improbable—unless the creators who designed these characters intentionally (or subconsciously) gave them very specific facial characteristics.

The odds of 5 randomly selected villains having the same style type are something like 1 in 15 million (because there’s 63 different style types, so that’s 1/63 multiplied by itself 4 times).

Cruella de Vil

Same extremely curvy arched brows, heavy lidded eyes, small turned up nose. Cruella is a Romantic Ethereal Dramatic with dominant Romantic.

Romantic: the most villainous style essence?

What do we make of the fact that five of the most famous Disney villains not only all have the same style type, but also all have the same dominant essence—the passionate Romantic essence, the essence that symbolizes deep emotions like love?

Below I’ll list some theories on why Romantic can appear so intimidating and address the question of whether people who watched these movies may be biased to view real-life Romantic Ethereal Dramatics as wicked or at least intimidating.

Which style type is the fairest of them all?

First, let’s discuss the princess/protagonist face type. The above villains each share their story with a female protagonist—and these protagonists all share the exact same style type.

Snow White, Aurora, Ariel, Cinderella, and Anita are all dominantly Ingenue, with smaller amounts of Gamine and Natural. In contrast to their stories’ glamorous, otherworldly antagonists, the protagonists’ faces look sweet, playful, and down-to-earth.

So, that’s Disney’s—or at least Snow White’s—answer to the question of which type is fairest of them all: Natural Gamine Ingenue. And Romantic Ethereal Dramatic is most dangerous of them all.

Why do the protagonists all have the same type?

The protagonists may all be dominantly Ingenue because Ingenues tend to look pretty, sweet, and kind, embodying the quintessential vibe of a Disney protagonist. Ingenues and Gamines also both appear youthful, and these movies are marketed to young people. And Natural embodies some of the strength that Disney (maybe?) wanted to portray its female protagonists as possessing, while also having a down-to-earth vibe that’s a big contrast to the villains’ otherworldly, Ethereal Dramatic looks.

Why do the villains all have the same type?

As to the villains, they plausibly all have Dramatic because long, sharp shapes can easily seem intimidating. The presence of Ethereal may reflect the creators’ aim to portray the villains as appearing otherworldy. Ethereal’s uniqueness can make the essence feel unconventional.

Can Romantic read as evil?

To me the hardest question is why Romantic would be the villains’ dominant essence. Maybe the answer is straightforward—like, the villains are supposed to look older than the youthful Ingenue protagonists, as a way of distinguishing them and making them seem more intimidating and powerful. Romantic can read as a more grown-up version of Ingenue, so maybe that’s why the dominant Ingenue protagonists confront dominant Romantic antagonists.

It might be as simple as that. Some other possibilities:

• The Romantic essence embodies passionate emotion—perhaps most obviously love but arguably also other intense emotions, like anger and jealousy. Cartoon villains are often overdramatic and histrionic, so having expressive Romantic faces may help to convey their intense emotions.

• Related to the above, while the Romantic and Dramatic essences are literally dissimilar (curvy vs. straight lines), they actually have a good amount of conceptual overlap in that both can appear sophisticated, luxurious, and intense. The similarly intense vibes of Romantic and Dramatic, especially when combined, could make a cartoon villain seem especially intimidating.

• Villains tend to have hyperbolic schemes and ambitions, and Romantic is hyperbolically large and curvaceous. Compared to Romantic, the other essences are more conservative and moderate in shape and/or vibe. Classic shapes tend not to be very large; Ingenue and Gamine have shortened shapes; Dramatic and Ethereal have narrow shapes; Natural shapes can be both wide and long, but their bluntness makes them appear casual and understated. So if there’s an essence that most characterizes luxury and excess—greed, we could say, to use a negative connotation—it might be Romantic. So Romantic villains may symbolize the danger of excess.

Can Disney characters create real-life biases?

If we’ve seen these movies, are we biased to fear real-life Romantic Ethereal Dramatics? And to view Natural Gamine Ingenues as sweet, friendly, and princess-like?

Maybe not. One argument would be that unless you watched these movies several or dozens or hundreds of times, they’re not going to cause you to be biased against or for those style types. Maybe viewing these characters in a movie isn’t enough exposure to produce bias.

You could also argue that because the villains’ faces are so exaggerated, they don’t resemble real people enough to make us biased toward real people.

In real life, both of these types—Romantic Ethereal Dramatic and Natural Gamine Ingenue—are beautiful (not that the cartoon villains aren’t—I think the villains’ faces have a lot of beauty) and don’t necessarily resemble the cartoon faces in a meaningful way, because the cartoon faces are so exaggerated.

But I’ve also heard that caricatures tend to be more memorable and stay longer in our minds compared to non-exaggerated images. So maybe the fact that these villains have such unconventional looks actually makes them more likely to subconsicously bias us—even if we’ve only seen these movies once or twice—because their exaggerated faces are so memorable.

If you saw these movies enough times, maybe some level of bias set in. But if that’s true, then it’s also true that positive portrayals of Romantics, Ethereals, and Dramatics in other media could override that bias.