Was Princess Qajar a Symbol of Beauty?

by KaiserPhilip

pictures

So this has been circulating again, and I want to ask if she actually was considered beautiful for her time. To expound would her husband or suitors chase after her beauty and not her status?

AksiBashi

Princess Qajar did not actually exist (Qajar is a tribal or dynastic name, not a first name, so that's your first clue that something's up), and the linked photos are actually of two different women. I'd recommend reading this blog post, linked a few times in the comments, on the subject of the photographs and standards of beauty in nineteenth-century Iran. (If you're interested in diving straight into the scholarship, the post draws on Afsaneh Najmabadi's book Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity; but the post itself is worth reading as a straightforward refutation of the "Princess Qajar" story.