Classic Hollywood Beauty
Romantic Classic Ingenue
So far I’ve found just three Romantic Classic Ingenue celebrities—and they all happen to be iconic Old Hollywood movie stars.
Is this a coincidence, or is there a meaningful reason that Romantic Classic Ingenues seem so rare in modern day? More on this mystery below!
Romantic Classic Ingenue celebrities
Romantic Classic Ingenue celebrities are pictured on Pinterest here and listed below:
Ingrid Bergman
Lana Turner
Yvonne de Carlo
Romantic Classic Ingenue fashion
For Romantic Classic Ingenue fashion, hair, and makeup, you can take inspiration from Golden Age Hollywood actresses—stars who were prominent in film sometime between the 1920s and 1960s.
The trendy styles of this age were much more conventionally feminine than the modern age’s ever-present athleisure uniform. Golden Age hairstyles also exuded quintessential “Hollywood Glamour,” with hair often styled in Romantic or Ingenue curls, and in a chin-length or shoulder-length cuts that suit Classic.
Especially if your strongest essence is Romantic—which based on my typing is true of the three RCI celebrities I’ve identified so far—then you can really go all out on the glamorous aspects of this essence blend. The fashion, hair, and makeup of Old Hollywood stars can provide great inspiration.
But if you’re interested in fashion that doesn’t look overly formal, and that helps you fit in more with the modern age, you still have many options, especially for dresses. Sundresses and baby doll tops and dresses often appear very modern (or retro in a trendy way). These styles also commonly have a lot of Romantic, Ingenue, or both—though sometimes these styles do incorporate casual Natural elements, so you’ll want to check for that, especially in silhouette.
A wholly Romantic Ingenue dress, with a large Romantic floral print, sweet Ingenue puff sleeves, and Ingenue baby doll silhouette. There isn’t significant Classic here, but you could easily layer over a basic Classic cardigan. You can also pair Romantic Ingenue tops with basic dress Classic pants, or even Classic jeans. For Classic pants, look for styles that appear very simple and polished, and that don’t appear extreme in any dimension (like not being overly long, overly embellished, or having an extremely low rise).
Romantic Classic Ingenue faces
Romantic Classic Ingenues, more than almost any other style type, have characteristically rounded faces and features. They epitomize soft beauty.
Types like Romantic Ethereal Classic and Romantic Ethereal Ingenue also have a lot of roundness and softness. But in these types, Ethereal often adds some degree of facial elongation.
Do RCIs have round faces?
When we talk about people having “round” faces, we typically understand that most faces aren’t literally circular, but are rather more oval—notably longer than they are wide. While the Romantic Classic Ingenue celebrities I’ve found so far might not have literally have circular faces and features, they come closer than most other types.
And it’s not just their faces’ perimeters—their internal facial features are also characterized by roundness. You can trace roughly circular shapes around the contours of their eyes, lips, cheeks, and nasal tips. Their jawlines are typically rather narrow and short and don’t have obvious angles or sharp lines. Their symmetrical and youthful features can give Romantic Classic Ingenues a perpetually youthful yet glamorous, Barbie-doll type appearance.
Above are Romantic Classic Ingenues Lana Turner, Ingrid Bergman, and Yvonne de Carlo. We see that their faces are mostly characterized by curving shapes, with the absence of marked angles or elongation in horizontal space.
To me these three celebrities also have a lot of facial similarity to one another, in terms not just of the shapes of their features but also their placements and proportions. This makes sense, because the Classic essence tends to result in faces having a specific layout and configuration of facial features, with features not appearing especially close together or far apart.
What do Romantic facial features look like?
In other posts, I’ve talked a lot about how Dramatics and Ingenues have literally opposite shapes—long and narrow for Dramatic, short and round for Ingenue. And how long, curving Ethereal and short, pointy Gamine are also literal opposites. I’ve also noted that Romantic and Natural can be argued to be figurative opposites—Romantic is extremely glamorous, while Natural is extremely casual.
This all leads to the question of whether Romantics and Naturals also have literally opposite shapes.
In a sense, the answer seems like yes. Natural faces tend to be characterized by horizontal width, with wider jaws and chins relative to average human faces. In contrast, Romantic faces tend to have narrower, more tapered jaws and chins.
Natural mouths also often appear somewhat wide. Compared to Naturals, Romantics typically have smaller mouths in horizontal space, while having greater vertical lip volume.
Same with eyes—round Romantic eyes don’t tend to appear horizontally elongated, at least compared to average human eyes, but they will often be wider in vertical space, and sometimes more heavy-lidded than average eyes. In contrast, Natural eyes don’t tend to have notable vertical height, and they don’t tend to appear round or circular.
So with Natural, facial features are generally stretched in horizontal space, making the face and its features look overall wider. In contrast, with Romantic, facial features are generally stretched in vertical space, with the eyes, lips, and cheeks becoming vertically elongated and round.
Importantly, the Romantic essence isn’t characterized by so much vertical elongation that Romantic features actually start to look elongated (meaning much longer than they are wide). Instead, the Romantic essence is characterized by a degree of vertical elongation that makes features appear round and circular, rather than long.
So that’s what we tend to see on Romantic faces—instead of width or stretching in horizontal space, we see stretching in vertical space that makes features appear circular.
And because the majority of human faces—though certainly not all of them—have a significant amount of yang essence, including strong or wide jawlines, Romantic Classic Ingenues stand out with their very soft, curving beauty.
Are RCIs really rare?
Faces without any yang essence tend to be somewhat rare in general, and so far RCIs seem like a notably rare type.
In my view, many people who are considered fully yin actually have evident sharpness in their faces, often in their bone structure.
An example I mention a lot is Marilyn Monroe, who’s been considered a Romantic Ingenue but actually has significant Dramatic, too. She looks similar to RCIs Lana Turner, Yvonne de Carlo, and Ingrid Bergman, but Marilyn’s beauty is overall more intense and intimidating, thanks to her angular jawline (which she often obscured by posing with her head held at a rather odd angle).
Below, Yvonne de Carlo also uses a head angle plus some strategically placed lace that, intentionally or not, makes her face look artificially more angular.
But when we see her straight on, we can discern through virtual draping that this angularity is largely manufactured, and that she doesn’t have signficant yang essence.
A fascinating thing about Yvonne de Carlo is that despite her very soft beauty, she’s famous for playing a character who exudes arguably very intimidating vibes: on the show The Munsters, she was styled like this (yes, this is the same Yvonne as the one pictured above):
With heavy eyeliner, darkened brows, and a very unique hairstyle (assuming it’s a wig, especially because she suddenly has a deep widow’s peak), Yvonne de Carlo’s soft RCI beauty becomes a lot more intimidating. Her face is still composed almost entirely of curving shapes, but the Dramatic hair and makeup give her image a much more intense feel.
Yvonne de Carlo isn’t fully harmonious in the intimidating Munsters makeup and hair, but to me her facial features do seem to be able to exude some degree of intimidation, especially when she tilts her head downward and stares straight at the camera. This pose tends to make a face look more Dramatic (even when a face doesn’t have any Dramatic essence to begin with), because it makes a face appear narrower and longer, key Dramatic qualities. Even if you don’t have any Dramatic essence, tilting your head far down can be imposing, like you’re literally and maybe figuratively “looking down on someone” with disdain.
Yvonne’s ability to appear intimidating in this hair and makeup, despite her very soft beauty, might also reflect that Romantic has an intense vibe.
Is Romantic beauty intimidating?
I’d say Romantic pretty easily wins the status of second most intense essence, rivaled only by Dramatic. But it took me a while to recognize that Romantic can have a highly intimidating quality. For instance, initially I was surprised that several of the most iconic cartoon Disney villains (Maleficent, Snow White, Cinderella, and more) all have Romantic as their dominant essence.
But I think it makes sense when we consider that part of why these villains are scary is that they have a lot of passion and emotion and desire—typically desire for horrible things to happen, but desire nonetheless.
So because the Romantic essence conveys deep emotion, highly Romantic faces can look intimidating by projecting an intense, passionate, unsmiling facial expression.
The ability of Romantic to convey intense emotions, and a wide range of emotion, might also partly explain why so many actresses past and present have a lot of Romantic essence.
Romantic can be confusing in that it’s characterized by soft shapes that don’t necessarily read as geometrically intimidating but that nevertheless can have an intimidating, extremely passionate and intense aura.
Why aren’t Romantic Classic Ingenues as popular today?
The short answer is that they might be—it’s possible that many modern celebrities are Romantic Classic Ingenues, and I’ve just yet to type them. I’m always typing new celebrities, so soon I may come across large swathes of RCIs.
Even if RCIs aren’t popular in modern day, a crucial point is that popular doesn’t equate to beautiful. The most popular songs, for instance, or the most popular movies, aren’t necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing in any objective sense.
In fact, you can’t really say that any form of beauty is most aesthetically pleasing in an objective sense. Scientists may try to claim that they’ve discovered formulas that reveal the most beautiful faces, but if you go through their logic, you’ll find that there are always assumptions in their thinking—assumptions that aren’t fact but are rather opinion. There just isn’t an objective way to say what is most beautiful. Art and beauty are about human perception, about humans’ subjective perceptions of the external world. And ultimately subjective perception is, by definition, based on opinion.
In modern day, sculpted jawlines might be “in”, with an alarming rise of buccal fat surgeries. But no matter how many celebrities carve away the beautiful and youthful fat from their faces, angular jawlines aren’t more aesthetically pleasing than soft and curving ones.
Plus, full lips are also popular, and RCIs do tend to have this trait. Their faces blend some more popular, trendy features with more timeless features.
Weird theory?
One kind of odd theory I have: maybe angular faces are increasingly common today because we overall have better nutrition, which enables people to grow taller, and so all our bones, including the ones in our faces, on average grow a bit larger.
I don’t have evidence for this, and it also really doesn’t seem supported by RCI Ingrid Bergman, who apparently was 5 feet 9 inches. Lana Turner apparently was only slightly short at 5 foot 3, and Yvonne de Carlo was about average height at 5 foot 4.
So—I don’t know. Probably not the best theory, although I do think it’s true that people are a bit taller nowadays, so maybe there could be some small truth in it. Or not, I don’t know.
Smartphone face?
I’ve heard a theory about how some people have “smartphone faces” meaning that their faces look extremely modern.
In contrast, the theory suggested that some people have more timeless beauty, using the illustration of certain actors who are convincing in period films because their faces convincingly look like “they’ve never seen a smartphone”—their faces look a lot less modern than the so-called “smartphone face".”
I forget what conclusions were drawn about exactly what makes a face look like a “smartphone face,” but from my perspective, I’d argue that Romantic Classic Ingenues don’t fit this category.
RCI’s very soft beauty seems to be more frequently portrayed in Old Hollywood, as opposed to modern Hollywood—modern day celebrities commonly have marked facial angularity.
This doesn’t make Romantic Classic Ingenues unbeautiful—clearly they are extremely beautiful, with beauty that many view as timeless. And if you styled them in modern hair and makeup, I’m sure they could be popular social media beauty influencers. It’s just that because of the extreme softness of their faces, they also very much fit the standards of old Hollywood, which seemed to favor more delicate beauty.