Picture this: A young woman spends three hours every morning having her floor-length hair styled, sleeps on a metal bed frame without a pillow, and wears a leather mask packed with raw veal on her face each night. She exercises obsessively, maintains a 16-inch waist through extreme corseting, and weighs herself three times a day. This isn’t a modern-day influencer or Hollywood starlet—this is Empress Elisabeth of Austria, one of the most beautiful women of 19th-century Europe, whose pursuit of perfection became both her crown and her curse.
From Bavarian Tomboy to Imperial Beauty Icon
Born into the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach on December 24, 1837, Elisabeth enjoyed an informal upbringing where her parents encouraged her to explore the countryside and enjoy creative activities. Unlike her well-educated older sister Helene, who was originally intended to marry Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, Elisabeth was described by some biographers as having “a round peasant face” and being quite ordinary-looking in her youth.
Everything changed when 15-year-old Elisabeth accompanied her sister to meet the Emperor in 1853. Franz Joseph took one look at the spirited teenager and fell instantly in love, proposing to her instead of her sister. They married on April 24, 1854, when Elisabeth was just 16 years old.
But this fairy-tale beginning had a dark twist. The marriage thrust her into the much more formal Habsburg court life, for which she was unprepared and which she found suffocating. What followed was a lifetime obsession with beauty that would both define and destroy her.
The Hair That Became a Prison
Elisabeth’s most recognizable attribute was, undoubtedly, her thick, chestnut hair which grew all the way down to her feet. According to her Greek tutor Konstantin Christomanos, watching her hairdresser Fanny Feifalik work was like witnessing a sacred ritual: “With her white hands she burrowed in the waves of hair, raised them and ran her fingertips over them as she might over velvet and silk”.
But this crown of glory came at a steep price. The care and maintenance of these tremendous tresses required a time commitment of no less than three hours per day. Her hairdresser, Franziska Feifalik, was forbidden to wear rings and required to wear white gloves; after hours of dressing, braiding, and pinning up the Empress’ tresses, the hairs that fell out had to be presented in a silver bowl for inspection.
The psychological toll was immense. Elisabeth once confessed, “I am a slave to my hair”, and she often got upset and complained that the weight of the elaborate double braids and pins gave her headaches. When her hair was washed with a combination of eggs and cognac once every two weeks, all activities and obligations were cancelled for that day.
The Impossible Waist: Beauty’s Brutal Price
Perhaps no aspect of Elisabeth’s beauty obsession was more extreme than her pursuit of an impossibly tiny waist. During the peak period of 1859–60, she reduced her waist to 40 cm (16 inches) in circumference. To put this in perspective, her 19-inch waist was smaller than the circumference of an American college football.
Elisabeth had rigid, solid-front corsets made in Paris out of leather, “like those of Parisian courtesans,” probably to hold up under the stress of such strenuous lacing, “a proceeding which sometimes took quite an hour”. Before going fox-hunting, she was sometimes sewn into her clothes to accentuate her figure.
This obsession with her waist wasn’t merely vanity—it was a form of control in a life where she had precious little. She was obsessively concerned with maintaining her youthful figure and beauty, developing a restrictive diet and wearing extremely tightlaced corsets.
Revolutionary Fitness Routines in Restrictive Times
In an era when women of this era simply did not sweat, Elisabeth was pioneering what we might now recognize as extreme fitness. Every castle she lived in was equipped with a gymnasium; the Knights’ Hall of the Hofburg was converted into one, mats and balance beams were installed in her bedchamber so that she could practise on them each morning.
The Empress was obsessed with gymnastics and could often be seen dangling from the rings! A fervent horsewoman, she rode every day for hours on end, becoming the world’s best female equestrian at the time. When she could no longer endure hours in the saddle due to gout, Sisi went for very long walks that could last up to 10 hours!
Midnight Beauty Rituals: The Bizarre World of 19th-Century Skincare
Elisabeth’s nighttime beauty routine was equally extreme. Elisabeth slept without a pillow on a metal bedstead, because she believed it was better for retaining and maintaining her upright posture; either raw veal or crushed strawberries lined her nightly leather facial mask.
Her skincare arsenal included homemade concoctions that sound both fascinating and frightening by today’s standards. To keep her complexion soft, she would slather her cheeks with pure honey and crushed strawberries — thereby calling upon the effects of modern fruit acids (akin to today’s chemical peels). She applied slices of raw veal to her face during the night, binding it with a leather mask that kept the meat in constant contact with her skin while sleeping.
She was also heavily massaged, and often slept with cloths soaked in either violet- or cider-vinegar above her hips to preserve her slim waist; her neck was wrapped with cloths soaked in Kummerfeld-toned washing water.
The Diet of Despair: Eating Disorders in Royal Form
Modern historians widely believe that the Empress suffered from Anorexia Nervosa. Her eating habits were severely restricted and often bizarre. For weeks at a time, she would eat nothing but eggs, oranges, and raw milk. To make this happen, she took her own goats or cows with her on her travels.
At other times, she would partake only of pressed extract of raw chicken, partridge, venison and beef. She was preoccupied with her body weight and ensured she never weighed more than 50 Kilograms; a rather low weight considering she was 5 foot 8 inches tall. The Empress was not only anorexic, but also, like Princess Diana, bulimic.
The Fear of Aging: When Beauty Becomes a Prison
As Elisabeth aged, her obsession with maintaining her appearance intensified rather than diminished. She could not even stand the thought of getting old, as she wrote in her diary: “Ah, the horror of growing old, to feel the hand of time laid upon one’s body, to watch the skin wrinkling, to awake and fear the morning light, and to know that one is no longer desirable! Life without beauty would be worthless to me”.
Elisabeth had an aversion to being photographed, especially later in her life, and was quick with a fan or sunshade to prevent her portrait being taken. She refused to sit for photographs from the age of thirty-two.
The Tragic End: Beauty That Couldn’t Save Her
On September 10, 1898, while walking to the landing stage of a steamer ship in Geneva, Switzerland, the then 60-year-old Empress of Austria was stabbed through the heart with a thin, needle-like metal file by Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni.
In a cruel irony, her vanity played a role even in her death. Sisi was one of the 19th century’s famous “tight lacers” with a corset cinched to a mere 19.5 inches for the majority of her life. After being stabbed, she fell to the ground, but amazingly was able to stand again and walk all the way to the landing bridge of the ship before becoming weak. Her corset restricted the bleeding, initially concealing the severity of her wound and allowing her to walk to the boat before collapsing.
The Legacy of a Beauty Obsession
Elisabeth was adept at crafting a persona that may not have promoted her standing in the Viennese court but certainly helped shape the public’s perspective of her to this day. Today, some 25 million people visit Hofburg, the Habsburg dynasty’s imperial palace in Vienna. Included in this complex is the Sisi Museum, which houses the empress’ private apartments.
Her story resonates powerfully in our modern age of social media and beauty filters. Like today’s influencers, Elisabeth understood the power of image, but at what cost? Comparing Sisi to the former Princess of Wales, Diana, we see echoes of the same pressures that continue to plague public figures today.
Elisabeth’s legacy serves as both inspiration and warning—a reminder that the pursuit of beauty, when it becomes obsession, can transform from a source of power into a prison of our own making. Elisabeth of Austria spent her life yearning for peace and a measure of happiness but the tragedy of her life was that she never really found it.
The Bottom Line: Empress Elisabeth’s story isn’t just about 19th-century beauty standards—it’s a timeless cautionary tale about the psychological toll of perfectionism and the dangerous pursuit of an impossible ideal. In our age of Instagram filters and beauty standards as demanding as ever, her story feels remarkably, tragically contemporary.
What do you think about Elisabeth’s story? Do you see parallels between her obsessions and modern beauty culture? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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