All of Disney’s finest princesses have doubled as enchanting role models for young girls for the past several decades. But the way these royal beauties have been portrayed has left the same young girls with mixed messages. With their unnaturally thin and perfectly contoured bodies and faces, these cartoons emulate unattainable figures.
It’s time fantasy had a bit of realism, and Katie Corvino from Buzzfeed conjured up just that with her ideas on what these tiara-wearers would look like with historical accuracy. In the era of Disney Princesses, there were no razors, no tweezers, no tweaking of the body’s natural hair. Most women in the U.S. did not begin shaving and grooming until 1915, when Harper’s Bazaar depicted a woman sans armpit air and with her arms over her head.
No matter how smooth this last century has felt, thanks to the media’s involvement in perpetrating a beautification movement and sparking the notion that female body hair be considered unseemly, the technology available now was hardly available in the era of mermaids, flying carpets and glass slippers.
Princess Aurora was unconscious for years. How were her eyebrows kept so exquisitely tamed? Who was plucking them for her?
If Rapunzel can have hair draped as long as a tower, she can have hairy eyebrows.
Ariel — when she magically received her legs, did they just happen to come with a magic razor, too?
Katie Corvino answered these questions in the form of her illustrations. Of course these princesses represent a fictitious world, but it is one so many wish to make a reality. It tends to be an impossible feat.
Katie took the classic narrative for a turn and showed what princesses would look like with body hair, with something natural, all while proving that natural does not necessarily detract from beautiful.
Click here to take a look at nine Disney Princesses, much hairier than you expected.