The Women Who Taught Me Beauty

There are many things men get wrong about women. One of the biggest is the idea that women exist primarily through the male gaze. They don't.

There are many things men get wrong about women.

One of the biggest is the idea that women exist primarily through the male gaze—that we dress, decorate ourselves, and shape ourselves to attract attention, win approval, or capture some mythical tall, dark, and handsome trophy stag.

I have always suspected something different.

Women look at other women.

We notice each other constantly. The dress. The shoes. The haircut. The lipstick. The way someone carries herself. The woman who somehow manages to look effortless while the rest of us are wondering how she did it.

And yes, there are moments when we absolutely get dolled up for a man. There is a certain theatrical pleasure in the cliché: the slinky dress, the high heels, the come-hither lingerie.

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But everyday beauty is a different conversation. Most of the time, we are speaking to each other. The compliments that stay with me are almost always from women. Women understand the details. They know the difference between looking beautiful and looking like yourself.

Beauty is a strange and fickle thing anyway. It changes with time, culture, age, and personal history. What one person finds breathtaking, another might barely notice. So I started thinking about what I find beautiful in a woman. And I realized the women who stay with me all have something in common.

They are not interchangeable.

They have faces with stories. Voices with character. A kind of ease that cannot be manufactured. They are sensual without performing sensuality. They seem curious, independent, and completely themselves.

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Beauty, to me, has never been perfection. It is presence. It is a woman who walks into a room already comfortable inside her own skin. A woman who seems mysterious because she belongs entirely to herself. I think my ideas about beauty were formed much earlier than I realized. They came from my childhood. From the movies my parents and grandparents loved. Not the films of my own generation, but the older ones that appeared on television during quiet late evenings.

European cinema.

French and Italian glamour.

The 1960s and 1970s.

Women with minimal makeup and natural hair. Smoking cafés. Old hotels. Riviera summers. Art museums. Black eyeliner. A little melancholy. A little mystery. Those women had confidence without trying too hard. Sensuality without effort. Intelligence and self-possession. Individuality over conventional perfection.

They had faces with character. They had stories.

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Here are the women who shaped my idea of beauty, in no particular order:

• Brigitte Bardot

• Raffaella Carrà

• Monica Vitti

• Britt Ekland

• Nico

• Monica Bellucci

• Anna Karina

• Romy Schneider

• Veruschka

• Lauren Bacall

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Brigitte Bardot

Brigitte Bardot was my first movie crush. I watched And God Created Woman one late night with my grandparents and was completely transfixed. How could a woman be so animalistically sexy?

But what fascinated me wasn’t just her beauty. It was her freedom. She seemed untamed, almost as if she belonged more to the sea and the sun than to society. She moved through the world with a kind of natural confidence that felt impossible to imitate.

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Raffaella Carrà

Raffaella Carrà was everywhere on German television when I was growing up. I remember watching her perform “Far l’amore”—the blonde bob, the mischievous smile, the playful sexuality, the complete lack of apology. She had this incredible combination of sweetness and danger. She was sexy, but she was also funny. She was glamorous, but she never seemed trapped by glamour.

As a shy and bookish girl, she represented the person I wanted to become. And in some ways, I did. Inside, I remained an introvert. But outside, I developed a certain energy—a little armor that said: don’t underestimate me. I may be soft, but I am not fragile.

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Monica Vitti

Monica Vitti changed my idea of what beauty could be. She wasn’t just a classic beauty. She could be elegant, strange, funny, distant, and vulnerable. She didn’t seem to be performing femininity for anyone.

There was intelligence in her face. She made me understand that beauty wasn’t about being perfectly pleasing. Sometimes the most captivating women are the ones who make you curious.

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Britt Ekland

Britt Ekland bewitched me in The Wicker Man. She wasn’t simply beautiful. She seemed mythical. When she sang and danced in that film, with her ethereal voice and otherworldly presence, I wanted to become some kind of woodland creature. I wanted to live in a cottage, collect herbs, and join a mysterious forest community.

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Nico

Christa Päffgen is my forever muse. She fascinates me because she represented another kind of beauty entirely. She was severe, mysterious. She looked like she perennially belonged in black-and-white photographs, underground clubs, forgotten European cities—and obvs the Velvet Underground. She wasn’t warm or approachable. She was haunting. She taught me that beauty could be intellectual, strange, and even a little intimidating.

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Monica Bellucci

Monica Bellucci carries a kind of old-world Italian glamour that feels almost impossible to replicate. She is undeniably sensual, but never seems to be performing sensuality. There is confidence there. Ease.

What I admire most is that her beauty feels like an extension of who she is, not the entirety of who she is. She reminds me of the women from another era who understood that being beautiful and being interesting were never opposites.

Anna Karina

Anna Karina always looked like she knew something you didn’t. There was a playfulness in her face. A curiosity. A mischievousness. She wasn’t polished into perfection. She was expressive. Alive. She taught me that charm can be far more powerful than conventional beauty.

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Romy Schneider

Growing up in Germany, Christmas meant one thing: Sissi. Every year, the television stations showed Sissi and its sequels, and every year I watched. As a child, I loved the dresses, the romance, the fairy-tale world. As an adult, I see something deeper in Romy Schneider. There was always a vulnerability beneath her beauty. A hint of sadness. A sense that she was carrying a whole inner world.

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Veruschka

Veruschka never looked entirely real. She was less a model than a work of art. Tall, dramatic, almost surreal. She transformed herself into images rather than simply posing for them. She taught me that beauty could be theatrical. It could be strange. It could be something you create.

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Lauren Bacall

Lauren Bacall had presence. Before she even spoke, she owned the room. It wasn’t only the famous voice, the eyes, the elegance. It was the feeling that she was completely at home in herself. She understood something essential: Beauty is not just how you look. It is how you inhabit yourself.

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Come to think. I believed this list was about beautiful women. Now I think it is about beautiful ways of being. These women come from different countries, different decades, different worlds. They don’t look alike. They don’t represent one single version of femininity. But they all possess the quality I have always been drawn to. Presence. A face that has lived. A confidence that doesn’t need permission.

That is the beauty I recognize. Not perfection. Not sameness. Something much rarer. Someone completely, unmistakably herself.