Over the past decade, beauty has transformed in a quiet, but far-reaching way. Not through red carpets or designer campaigns, but through something as ordinary as the front-facing camera. That small screen taught us how to present ourselves: which angles flatter, how light softens or sharpens features, and how symmetry becomes a kind of currency. As this digital gaze became part of daily life, it subtly influenced not just how we see ourselves, but how film and television imagine characters, even those from centuries before smartphones existed.
Hollywood has always polished history, but in recent years the distance between past and present has shrunk even more. Instead of allowing characters to reflect the physical realities of their eras, many productions reshape those eras to meet current expectations of beauty. And beyond features or makeup, part of what makes someone “iPhone Face” is a certain modern awareness — a look that suggests the character knows what an iPhone is, even if the story takes place hundreds of years before. It’s a subtle, front-camera-shaped self-consciousness in how the face is held or expressed.
That’s why performances like Camila Morrone in Daisy Jones & The Six or Dakota Johnson in Persuasion (2022) feel unmistakably contemporary, even in period settings: they carry the micro-mannerisms of someone raised in the digital age. Meanwhile, Mia Goth in Frankenstein (2025) shows the opposite — an actress whose presence feels timeless and untouched by modern facial language, proving that “iPhone Face” is about expression as much as aesthetics. A medieval heroine may have the precise glow of someone raised on skincare trends. A Victorian woman may appear with the perfectly modern neatness of brows, skin, and proportions that quietly follow today’s aesthetics.
The point is not to criticize women who choose any kind of beauty practice, but to recognize how the industry often defaults to one visual language, even when the setting asks for something different, also forcing the actors to follow that standard.
This contrast becomes especially visible when a production chooses authenticity. Anne with an E is one of the clearest examples: Anne’s freckles, the unevenness of her braids, her wind-chapped cheeks — all feel lived-in, shaped by weather, childhood, and circumstance. Her appearance reflects the time she inhabits, not the time in which the show was filmed, and that choice gives the story a deeper emotional grounding.
Other projects have embraced a similar honesty in their casting and characterization. In The Witch, Thomasin’s face carries the rawness of a life without modern comforts. Little Women (2019) allows its sisters to look appropriately youthful, flushed, and imperfect, especially during scenes of illness, poverty, or winter hardship.
These productions highlight something we rarely notice until it’s missing: period dramas used to rely on faces that carried the texture of the world around them. Older classics like the 1995 Pride and Prejudice feature actors who look entirely of their time, not refracted through contemporary trends. Their beauty feels historically rooted, shaped by the limited technologies of their century.
But when new productions revisit the past while clinging only to the aesthetics of the present, something essential slips away. Characters from wildly different eras begin to look uncannily alike, not because of the performers themselves, but because the visual language around them has been standardized. The past becomes smoother, cleaner, more polished. Not for any narrative purpose, but because our technologies have taught us to equate “beauty” with a very specific, contemporary finish.
And this pressure doesn’t fall on women alone. Men in period dramas are increasingly filtered through the same front-camera expectations, often emerging with those uniformly chiseled jaws, poreless skin, gym-engineered bodies, and hyper-groomed hair that feel far more at home on a 2020s fitness influencer than on a 17th-century farmer or a Victorian academic. As with women, the issue isn’t the actors’ looks themselves, but the narrowing of aesthetic possibility — an industry-made homogeneity that erases the kinds of physical differences that once defined masculinity across history just as much as femininity.
Still, the hunger for authenticity is growing. Viewers increasingly celebrate productions that allow their characters to look like they genuinely belong to their environment. It’s not about rejecting modern beauty, but about embracing the idea that stories deepen when faces reflect the world of the story, not the world of the selfie.
Perhaps the next shift in visual culture won’t come from a new camera feature but from a willingness to let characters be imperfect in ways that feel meaningful. The charm of older-looking faces, the irregularities that reveal a life lived, the differences that make a character convincing — these details matter. They help us remember that beauty isn’t just what photographs well on a front camera. Beauty can also be the face that belongs unmistakably to its century, carrying the truth of the story it was chosen to tell.
—–
The article above was edited by Júlia Darú.
Liked this type of content? Check Her Campus Cásper Líbero for more!