hello, my beautiful doves🕊 @mina-le - Tumblr Blog

idk i always kind of roll my eyes at all those posts that are like “people used to be ugly in movies” like….. well☝️i don’t think that’s true. i think male actors have always had more leeway to look a bit imperfect. we’ve had average/weird looking male actors in every generation, including this one. but people have always needed to be “hot” for movies. and they did crazy shit for it!! marlene dietrich getting teeth extracted to hollow out her cheeks, carole lombard undergoing her (non-cosmetic) facial reconstruction without anesthesia because they thought it would look better, etc ad infinitum. do you know the kinds of diets they had women on to keep them skinny…. not to mention beauty standards for women of color tryna be in movies. like there’s a reason the three biggest black actresses of classic hollywood decades were josephine baker, lena horne, and dorothy dandridge: all pretty lightskinned with smaller mouths and noses -> approximating whiteness (no shade i love these women sm). i think the difference Today is that there are simply way more procedures you can get done since cosmetic medicine has evolved so much. so people can change more of their face with better and more reliable results than they could in the 1930s. point being that people have definitely always needed to be conventionally attractive to be in movies but given the physical scope of what could be conceivably changed about your appearance there was simply more diversity in like facial structure and features

#old hollywood #mentioned in: bring ugliness back to the movies