Drop Dead Gorgeous: 9 Iconic Gothic Beauty Looks from the Screen
The cinematic hair and makeup moments still haunting our beauty routines
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Smudge it. Sharpen it. Tease it sky-high. Some of cinema’s most memorable beauty looks reached far beyond the screen, awakening something in generations of spooky girls who finally saw a version of beautiful that felt like home.
For those of us who grew up surrounded by Baywatch bombshell perfection, trying on those versions of femininity could feel a little like playing dress-up in somebody else’s closet. Then we met Morticia Addams. Nancy Downs rimmed her eyes in black. Akasha appeared dripping in gold. Suddenly, beauty could be strange. It could be severe or even a little frightening, and still leave us completely mesmerized.
These characters gave us something to recognize ourselves in and, perhaps more importantly, something to experiment with. Their influence stepped out of the screen and landed directly in our vanity cases, where we smudged the liner darker and discovered just how good it felt when the reflection finally looked a little more like us.
These nine iconic looks helped set our spooky souls—and beauty routines—ablaze.
Laced Up: 18 Iconic Corsets from Film & Television
From Scarlett O'Hara to Xena, these are the underpinnings that stepped beyond the screen and into fashion history
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Few garments have worked harder in film than the humble corset.
For more than a century, costume designers have used it to communicate everything from power and ambition to romance, rebellion and utter ruin. A single tightening lace can signal the expectations placed upon a young woman. A structured bodice can transform a queen into a monarch of the ages, a vampire into a legend or a showgirl into an icon. Long before a character speaks, the corset often tells us exactly who they are.
Some became inseparable from the stories themselves. Scarlett O'Hara's lacing scene in Gone with the Wind remains one of the most famous moments in Hollywood history while Satine's ruby corset came to define an entire era of fashion when donned by Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge.
From gothic heroines and doomed aristocrats to pirates, vampires and queens, these are a few of our favourites.