A Mirror Reflecting Our Modern Obsession With Beauty History remembers her as the most beautiful woman in Europe. Paintings immortalized her. Poets praised her. Admirers obsessed over her impossibly tiny waist and sweeping floor-length hair. Empress Elisabeth of Austria—better known as “Sissi”—was the ultimate icon of 19th-century beauty. But behind the flawless image was a woman drowning in expectations, battling demons no one saw, and slowly losing herself to a world that measured her worth in inches and pounds. Her story feels like a fairytale at first. In reality, it is a tragedy with modern echoes we can no longer ignore. A Wild Child Forced Into a Golden Cage Elisabeth was born in 1837 into Bavaria’s House of Wittelsbach. Her childhood was wild and unrestrained—she rode horses bareback through forests, swam in cold lakes, scribbled poetry in journals, and lived in a world where freedom was her closest companion. She wasn’t trained to be a queen. She wasn’t polished, gro...