Audrey Hepburn Didn’t Think She was Beautiful

Audrey Hepburn is arguably one of the most beautiful women in the history of cameras, but according to her son Luca Dotti, the Breakfast at Tiffany’s actress didn’t think she was beautiful.

Interviewed by Vanity Fair, Dotti talked about his famous mother’s beauty:

“She thought she had a big nose and big feet, and she was too skinny and not enough breast” Dotti said. “She would look in the mirror and say, ‘I don’t understand why people see me as beautiful.'”

In the book, The Epigenetics Revolution, author Nessa Carey writes about how Audrey’s looks were, in part, forged in the fire of near starvation during World War II:

“It’s startling to think that this wonderful beauty was created by terrible hardship. Audrey Hepburn was a survivor of an event in World War II known as the Dutch Hunger Winter. This ended when she was sixteen years old, but the aftereffects of that period, including poor physical health, stayed with her for the rest of her life.”

Hepburn remained very thin throughout her life, and that was common for survivors of the Dutch Hunger Winter.

Audrey Hepburn lived in Rome for twenty years where she met and married Dr. Andrea Dotti, an Italian psychiatrist.

At age 40, she gave birth to Luca Dotti, and he has a new book coming out April 16, 2013.

Audrey in Rome features 200 candid photographs of his mother as she lived life in the city she loved. There are photos of Audrey out and about with family and friends, photos of her out shopping alone, and photos taken on the sets of several of her films.

Researchers studying beauty have found that beautiful faces like Audrey Hepburn’s fit the Golden Ratio found in patterns we see in nature in things like sunflowers, pine cones, and sea shells:

“The ideal distance from the pupil of a person’s eye to the center of the chin is 1.618 times the distance from the pupil to the end of the nose. The ideal length of a face is also 1.618 times its width and 1.618 times the distance between the eyes and the person’s mouth.”

Beauty isn’t just in the eye of the beholder, it’s in the math.

The Golden Ratio has been used to produce a geometric mask. If the mask fits a face, that face is most likely to be objectively considered beautiful. It fits Audrey Hepburn’s face perfectly so even though she thought her look, at best, was “a good mixture of defects,” her face was beautiful with scientifically verified, near perfect symmetry.