Sixty-five years after her death, Mexican painter Frida Kahlo continues to fascinate along with her introspective self-portraits, delivered to life with a charisma that was haunted by chronic pain (the results of a bus accident when she was 18 years old) and an insatiable appetite for love. She is taken into account one the of the best artists of all time, not just for the paintings she created but for her feminist spirit which trickled all the way down to everyone who knew her or of her. 

After which there was her complicated relationship with beauty. On the time, Frida was never considered an excellent beauty, and yet beauty is something she has turn out to be known for.  “Her light-tan face was not pretty, perhaps, by established norms, but she possessed – and even radiated – an odd and alluring beauty,” wrote Olga Campos after interviewing Frida Kahlo in 1949. Despite being insecure about lots of her features – from her crooked teeth to her moustache – Frida selected to play on her idiosyncrasies fairly than hiding them, enhancing her teeth with diamond dentures and exaggerating her facial hair in her paintings. On what can be her 112th birthday, we’ve rounded up six of Frida’s unique beauty philosophies and rituals.

She used a Revlon pencil to emphasize her monobrow

When Frida died in 1954, her husband Diogo Rivera closed off her bathroom and bedroom to preserve her essence for so long as he could. After he passed in 1957, art historians pieced together what they might of Frida’s beauty regime, which was made up of nearly all Revlon products. 

Frida’s make-up regime went like this: a thick layer of Ponds Day Creme topped with Coty’s loose rice powder, red lipstick in Revlon’s “Every part’s Rosy”, and red painted nails in either “Orchids to You” or “Raven Red”. As everyone knows, she threw hair removal to the wind, as a substitute emphasising her lush monobrow and lashes with a Revlon eyebrow pencil in “ebony” and black pigments by Talika (a French product that stimulated hair growth).

She used the color red as a logo for health and wellbeing

Analyzing a history of her self portraits, Frida’s health and wellbeing in the course of the time will be understood by her use of the color red. When she moved to San Francisco in 1930, her portraits and images during this time show her experimenting with dramatic rouge and daring lips, a logo of her good health and happiness. Throughout the sickest parts of her life when her chronic back pain and addictions were at their worst, she portrays herself as colourless, grey, gaunt. 

To Frida, the color red signified eroticism and insurrection. Frida loved lipstick and would kiss her love letters and images during affairs when posting them to her lovers. 

In 1939 she wrote to Nickolas Muray (an artist with whom she had an on and off affair for ten years) in a crisp envelope dotted in lipstick marks: “I’m sending you here tens of millions of kisses to your beautiful neck to make it feel higher … To you, my loveliest Nick, all my heart, blood and all my being. I like you. Frida.”

She was an early adopter of grills

Frida was famously insecure about her crooked teeth, made worse from a reported food plan of “brandy and sweets”. But as a substitute of hiding them, she flaunted their uniqueness by having two sets of dentures made, one in gold and one studded with diamonds. The dentures have since been lost, but they continue to be a shining example of Frida spinning imperfection into enhancement. 

Her signature scent was Shocking by Elsa Schiaparelli

With top notes of jasmine and honey layered with base scents of spicy cloves and civet, friends of Frida said in the event that they smelled honey and cloves, they knew she was nearby. The perfume received numerous press for its scandalous bottle within the hourglass shape of a lady – a subversiveness she took great pleasure in. In spite of everything, Frida’s bisexuality was often alluded to in her artwork. Considered one of her most famous paintings is Two Nudes in a Forest, which was supposedly inspired by her erotic affair with film star Dolores del Rio, who she was seeing on the time of the portrait. 

She wore fresh flowers in her hair as a logo of fertility

Frida’s signature glossy middle part and plaited flower crown weren’t purely aesthetic; supposedly the fresh flowers were a logo for fertility. She would select flowers from her garden on the cusp of blossoming because they “reminded her of sex organs”. Fertility was each an obsession and a demon of Frida’s in her desperate try to be a mother – a distinguished theme in loads of her work. 

While she became pregnant 3 times (that we all know of), tragically not one of the babies got here to term. Frida was forced to abort her first child due to her tilted pelvis, miscarried the second, and had one other termination on her third (believed to be since it was not her husband’s child). 

She had a posh relationship along with her androgyny

In her paintings, Frida would often exaggerate her unibrow and moustache, fiddling with the duality of masculine and female and lending her an androgynous appearance. Despite this, nonetheless, she wasn’t all the time comfortable about her perceived masculinity once saying “Of my face, I just like the eyebrows and the eyes. Except for that, I like nothing … I even have the moustache and typically the face of the other sex.”