Empress Sisi of Austria was considered one of the most beautiful women of her time, becoming a celebrity and fashion icon throughout Europe.

But very much like the celebrities of today, her fame and position at court brought immense pressure to stay youthful and beautiful.

This pressure manifested itself in different ways throughout Sisi's life.

Standing at 5 foot 8, she had a very slim figure, never weighing more than 110 pounds, with her waist measuring an astounding 16" around. Just for comparison, the Average Austrian woman is thought to have been around 4 foot 11 at this time.

Throughout her life, she was obsessive about her weight, constantly worrying that as she aged, she would lose her famous figure. She was scared of having too many children, thinking they would drive away her beauty and force her to appear pregnant in public, which she detested.

She would weigh herself daily, and then spend hours exercising daily, riding horseback, or walking, and even demanded a gym be built in any palace she stayed in.

Her diet habits were strange too she was often disgusted by meat, so her diet usually consisted of only milk and eggs, accompanied occasionally with the juice of a halfraw beef steak that was squeezed into a thin soup.

Any portrait made or taken had to be approved by the Empress and she was very particular about which ones made it out for public consumption. She didn’t allow portrait photographs after the age of 30, and her last official painted portrait was made at age 42.

But, we do have a few.

The Winterhalter Portrait and the Georg Raab portraits are some of the most famous both were painted when Sisi was in her 20s.

She was also photographed, right at the time that portrait photography was becoming common place. In fact, it’s thought that Empress Sisi may have been the first "celebrity" to get hassled by paparazzi.

You can see that Sisi has a bit of an enigmatic face looking slightly different in each image, but her defining features are her beautiful dark eyes and her long brown hair, which are said to have made her husband Franz Joseph fall in love with her at first sight.

In fact, her hair was a huge part of her beauty routine.... falling almost to her ankles, she had her dark chestnut hair cared for in a 3hour daily routing. Once a week, her schedule was cleared to accommodate washing it. Sisi would sit for hours as her hair was washed with cognac and eggs.

I’ve brought Sisi to life by compositing images of her over time. I wanted to make her look more like her photographs of course, which vary slightly from the stylized painted portraits.


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