What did Marie Antoinette REALLY look like? Facial Reconstructions from her Death Mask & Portraits

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Hello everyone and welcome to Royalty Now, where we bring you face to face with figures from the past.

We’re all familiar with Marie Antoinette - the French Queen known for excess, glamor, and a trip to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

But what did she really look like? Well, behind every glamorous portrait lies a hidden truth that’s revealed by her death mask: Marie Antoinette was not the classic beauty we think of today.

Today, we’ll talk about her appearance, her beauty routines, and portraits, and then, I’ll reveal never before seen facial reconstructions made from her death mask.

0:00 What did Marie Antoinette Look Like?
7:35 Death Mask
11:30 Reconstructions Revealed

Marie was noted for being pretty but not in a conventional way.

As her marriage negotiations to the Dauphin of France, Louis-Auguste, commenced, the French Envoy remarked that Marie looked messy, subtly hinting that she wasn’t polished enough for the French court.

So, before Marie could be engaged to the Dauphin, her mother made sure she was put through a makeover.

Experts were brought in from all over Europe. She was fitted with new silk dresses, as well as whalebone corsets that straightened her slouch.

A famed hairdresser, who had previously worked on the King’s mistress Madame de Pompadour, came to make sure her hair was fit for Versailles.

And then, most harshly, her crooked teeth were corrected with some very painful and rudimentary dental procedures. She was made to wear an early form of braces called Fauchard’s Bandeau.

After months of what can only be described as beauty bootcamp, shy little Marie was on her way to France. She would never see her home in Austria again.

In France, following her marriage to Louis, she shed the restraint that characterised her motherland: her cheeks would be rouged, her hair piled high on her head, and then, just for good measure, adorned with feathers.

While one nobleman, Count Tilly, remarked that the Queen had strange eyes and that she somewhat lacked elegance, he deeply praised her beautiful complexion. The flushed cheeks and pale, powdered skin were a true mark of Rococo fashion which Marie in many ways defined.

In keeping with the styles of the time, Marie Antoinette would powder her hair, a messy process that involved applying an oil, much like we might use a pomade today, and then powder would be applied, gripping to the oil and coating the hair. I can’t imagine trying to wash all of that out of your hair.

Sometimes a faux birthmark would be drawn on the cheek, or as Marie favored, a tiny heart near the corner of her lip.

She, like Count Tilly, notes the ‘radiance of her complexion’, saying that she had never seen one so brilliant - so brilliant in fact that Madame Vigee Lebrun could not render it to her satisfaction: ‘the colours were lacking with which to depict this freshness, these tones so exquisite…I had found in no other woman.’

Nonetheless, Marie’s distinctive facial features and the way they were rendered by artists may have actually inspired the style adopted by french portrait painters for years to come.

Madame du Barry’s portraits are a notable example of how Marie’s face changed portraits: we see a slimming of faces and a drooping of eyes - quite literally copying Marie's features - that weren’t present in portraits before this time.

One of the influences for my recreations, which is the most accurate source for her appearance, is the Death Mask of Marie Antoinette, supposedly taken soon after her execution. The mask was taken by a wax worker whose name you may recognize: Anna Maria Grosholtz, more commonly known as Madame Tussaud.

Some believe the mask of Marie Antoinette to be inauthentic, but it matches up closely with likenesses of the french queen taken during her life. But while portrait painters and sculptors were able to make subtle tweaks to flatter her appearance, the death mask doesn’t compromise.

In the painted portraits, we see that her lips are more plump and pinched as was the style at the time, with a fuller upper and more balanced upper lip.

We see her wide set eyes, but they appear large and exaggerated in the paintings. The mask also reveals she has more of a hooked nose in real life , and lower forehead

Considering all of these sources together - from the paintings, to the sculptures, and, ultimately, the mask, Marie Antoinette’s true appearance begins to emerge.

To create these facial reconstructions, I developed a composite image, working from her portraits as well as the mask.

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