Pretty Little Princesses

Archduchess Marie Anne of Austria

Thanks to Walt Disney, the word ‘princess’ evokes images of fairy-girls in frilly pink dresses, trotting around the ballroom in the arms of Prince Charming. They always have perfect teeth, immaculate clothes and luscious hair--this stereotype is woefully inaccurate.

Think about your trips to the dentist and ophthalmologist. What sort of things did they have to correct? For me, it was an underbite, crooked teeth and lazy eye. A couple years of vision therapy, braces and retainers fixed me up. But imagine what I’d look like if that care hadn’t been available.

Princesses had no access to dentists and ophthalmologists--so some of them were probably missing teeth and had bad vision. In addition, inbreeding within royal families often produced deformities.

Take Marie Antoinette for example. She had a condition known as the Hapsburg lip, in which the bottom jaw juts out and the lower lip is abnormally thick. This affliction was common among royal families--in severe cases it caused drooling and made it difficult to chew. Archduchess Marie Anne was so hideous that the family locked her away in the palace.

So let’s recap. A real princess almost undoubtably had dental problems. If she was a Hapsburg, then there’s likely some sort of deformity. We haven’t even talked about parasites, and there might have been vision difficulties. Not quite what you expected, is it? Just imagine how much lice Rapunzel had under all that hair…

This is Charles II - you can clearly see the Hapsburg lip in this portrait.