Paying homage to the world's most iconic beauty looks and the women that created them

All Nanas have shades of Jean Harlow in them. Whether it’s her neatly set waves (the worthy prize of wearing plastic rollers to bed every night, no doubt) or her spider-web thin, barely visible brow etchings – Harlow’s particular beauty ideal has spanned more than a century. And, this is because, quite simply, she was doing it first, before Marilyn, before Audrey, before any of them. 

Goaded and lauded for her acting talents in equal measure, it was her dazzling hair that most for which most of the praise was heaped on her. Of course, it was Harlow herself who birthed the term ‘platinum blonde’ by way of the 1931 film of the same name but ludicrously, she always strenuously denied having ever dyed it in the first place (legend has it, however, that she achieved her cotton wool hair via a weekly application of ammonia, Clorox bleach and Lux soap flakes. Shudder.). Blindly perpetuating what would become her legend further; Harlow followed that up with a role as a party girl in the 1933 film, Bombshell.

The blonde thing followed her around like a plague and she dined out on it – quite literally – for years. Yet despite the iconic angel-spun white locks atop her head, Jean Harlow was no classic beauty. She lacked the solemn intensity of Greta Garbo, the Perspex-cut cheekbones of Marlene Dietrich and later, the warmth and vivaciousness of Marilyn Monroe. 

"Here is a reclining Harlow swathed in white satin like a Greek Goddess, beaming into the camera - post-coital, arresting, divine."

In every film she made, Harlow appeared to take on a new physicality to her face. In Hell’s Angels, the Howard Hughes film for which she’s best remembered, she was glowing, resplendent. Yet, in later pictures, she appeared mousy, puffy and greige. And then there was one photograph that changed everything. The George Hurrell image of a reclining Harlow swathed in white satin, like a Greek Goddess, beaming into the camera, post-coital, arresting, divine.  She appears to have been poured onto the sofa from a vat of liquid gold. 

But this is no cookie-cutter Hollywood glamour face, here, the idiosyncrasies of her face come alive. Harlow has, what I can only describe as a sort of collapsed top lip, where the sides of her top lip slope downwards into itself. It’s a bit Betty Boop, a cartoonish caricature, but it also serves as a metaphorical echo of her generous bodily curves. It’s the antithesis to the identikit plumped up, homogenised pouts of now and I have grown to quite like it. 

"Her eyebrows are – in reality - impossible to pass off and would make me look like a cybergoth, rather than a scion of Hollywood’s golden age"

Her eyebrows are – in reality - impossible to pass off, unless of course, you don’t mind shaving the entire things off (see last week’s similar brow dilemma HYPERLINK) and snaking them back on carefully with a quill. They are no thicker than the head of a pin. And now, all these years later, would make me look like a cybergoth, rather than a scion of Hollywood’s golden age. 

Harlow died at 26. Of kidney disease – the very thing that was behind her changing, greying looks on film.  Had she have been born a hundred years later, she’d have been treated and would have survived. But then, she would have never have been the sultry, 30s Jean Harlow the whole world came to love. 

1. Bobbi Brown Long-wear Cream Shadow in Shore, £18.50 at House Of Fraser
2. Kevyn Aucoin Defining Brown, £19 at SpaceNK
3. Mac Strobe Cream, £23.50 
4. Bare Minerals Marvelous Moxie Lipliner in Amped, £13 at Selfridges 

Photography: Hugo Yanguela