Do Natural Classic Ingenues have the most “likable” beauty?

Ingenues look kind and trustworthy. Naturals look friendly and confident. And Classics look polite, symmetrical, and balanced.

Humans seem wired to like all these facial characteristics, with some research showing that people are drawn to:

• high-trust facial features (which often have round Ingenue shapes)

• symmetrical and proportionate faces (which are often Classic)

• smiling, friendly faces (Naturals tend to appear friendly, and of all the essences, tend to look most harmonious with wide smiles)

Selecting the style type with the most likable beauty is ultimately subjective. But a scientist might look at the data and conclude Natural Classic Ingenue.

Natural Classic Ingenue celebrities

Above are Natural Classic Ingenue celebrities Jessica Henwick, Laura Linney, and Audrina Patridge. More Natural Classic Ingenue celebrities are on Pinterest here and listed below:

• Aaron Paul

• Audrina Patridge

• Cheryl Hines

• Diane Kruger

• Emily Deschanel

• Jared Padalecki

• Jenna Fischer

• Jessica Henwick

• Kate Middleton

• Laura Linney

• Lauren Parsekian

• Leslie Mann

• Zooey Deschanel

Natural Classic Ingenue fashion

The Natural Classic Ingenue aesthetic is casual, polished, and girly.

If you have mostly Natural and Classic, you can dress heavily in Natural Classic casual chic style, which essentially consists of combining Natural basics like T-shirts and relaxed-fit jeans with Classic basics like button-downs and dress pants. Then you can add Ingenue in smaller details or accessories, like jewelry with tiny hearts or circular pendants

If you have a lot of Ingenue, you get endless pretty dress and skirt options:

A short circular skirt is an Ingenue wardrobe staple. Ingenues’ best colors tend to be soft and gentle, and Ingenue can do solid colors or small circular prints. This one works well because of the gentle blue, pink and white color palette, and because from far away, the print (a woman wearing a hat) creates the look of many small circular shapes.

A simple, open-neckline, slightly loose Natural Classic tank and Natural belt complete the look.

Another Natural Classic top paired with a short Ingenue skirt:

Here the flare and gentle pleats are great for Ingenue. The white button-down is highly Classic, and by being knotted into a boxy shape, it takes on a lot of easygoing Natural, too. The simple black and white color scheme also feels Classic.

(Black and white together sometimes feels more intense and bold—Dramatic or potentially Gamine—than conventional and Classic. In the above outfit, the individual pieces have an overall conventional, understated feel, so that’s how the color scheme reads, too.)

Another outfit with a different style skirt:

The small circular pattern, tier, and overall flared silhouette are all very Ingenue.

Off-the-shoulder necklines are often Romantic, since they’re conventionally sexy. But here, the top’s lettuce edge hem is iconically Ingenue. Wide shapes are great for Natural, and the above wide neckline reads as Natural especially thanks to the casual fabric. This is a Natural Ingenue top without meaningful Romantic.

While sexiness is often associated with Romantic, the truth is that all of the style essences can wear certain forms of tight, short, revealing, or conventionally sexy fashion.

The outfit is more revealing than a stereotypical Ingenue look, but it’s perfect for Natural Ingenue—I actually don’t think there’s much Classic here besides the simple watch.

Natural Classic Ingenue faces

As is probably true of all the types, some Natural Classic Ingenues look like more stereotypical versions of Natural Classic Ingenues than others. One celebrity who I’d consider a pretty textbook Natural Classic Ingenue—meaning she looks the way we’d theoretically expect a Natural Classic Ingenue to look—is Jenna Fischer:

With her round pretty eyes and small rounded nose, Fischer is dominantly Ingenue. Her wide bone structure adds Natural, and her overall balance and symmetry add Classic. I think it’d be hard to argue she has anything else, besides maybe Gamine, because the combination of youthful Ingenue with straight Natural shapes, plus restrained Classic, can sometimes mimic the look of youthful, angular, short Gamine shapes. But I don’t think Gamine is significant for her, and in the above green top, I think the main thing disconnected from her beauty is the colorful Gamine polka dots—which admittedly aren’t the easiest thing for anyone to pull off, but especially for someone’s whose beauty is overall too sweet, relaxed, and serious for that level of whimsy.

I associate Jenna Fischer with The Office, where she played a character whose personality sometimes embodied aspects of the Natural Classic Ingenue vibe—kindness, patience, and friendliness in her role as a secretary. So the fact that her casting seems to align with certain aspects of her style essences, and the fact that The Office is what I know her from, might also be why she’s such a clear example of a Natural Classic Ingenue to me. I wasn’t at all surprised when that was the result of my virtual draping.

But for other Natural Classic Ingenues, I was really surprised by the results of draping them virtually. One is Audrina Patridge:

My mental representation of Audrina typically includes long, sleek (Dramatic) hair, and often very glamorous fashion and makeup. I think I assumed she’d have Romantic or Dramatic or both.

But when you study Audrina’s facial features and ignore the vibes of her often glamorous styling, you can see that she actually has a ton of facial similarity to Jenna Fischer—pretty rounded eyes, small nose with rounded tip, wide bone structure at the jaw, and an overall balanced face. And virtual draping reveals that Audrina’s best lines are Natural, Classic, and Ingenue.

But to this day, it feels a little disjointed for me to think of Audrina as Natural Classic Ingenue, because that’s not how I’m used to seeing her styled. Picturing her in Natural Classic Ingenue styling actually feels kind of odd, despite that it harmonizes with her face.

I think it feels odd because a. I’m so used to seeing her in more glam, Romantic Dramatic styling, that she kind of doesn’t “look like herself” in Natural Classic Ingenue and b. I’m so used to seeing her with more glamorous hair and makeup, so when I picture her typical face—surrounded by glam hair and makeup—with Natural Classic Ingenue fashion, her face actually doesn’t harmonize with the NCI fashion. Her facial features do, but her facial features are wearing makeup that does not.

So based on her facial features, Audrina is a beautiful Natural Classic Ingenue. But because historically her styling has overall been much more glam, with heavy Romantic Dramatic vibes, to me it makes it tricky to visually and theoretically think of her as being harmonious in Natural Classic Ingenue fashion.

This illustrates one of the many reasons it can be so hard to type celebrities—because if we get used to seeing a celebrity in certain hair, makeup, and/or fashion, then even if that styling doesn’t reflect their essences, it can feel “weird” to see them in different styling. And if a celebrity almost always wears, say, Romantic Dramatic makeup, then if you virtually drape their face in Natural Classic Ingenue style, it might be hard to see them as harmonious in NCI, even if it is their style type, because the fashion clashes with their makeup.

Over the years, I’ve trained my eye to ignore makeup and to really focus on facial features during the virtual draping process. But it was something that took a lot of practice to do.

Audrina is extremely beautiful. It’s not that she’s less beautiful than Romantic Dramatic styling—it’s that she has a different kind of beauty.

Most likable?

With their friendly, balanced, and sweet vibes, Natural Classic Ingenues have extremely appealing beauty—humans might even be hard-wired to admire many of their key visual traits.