A hundred years of Vietnamese beauty in 100 seconds

By Nhung Nguyen   June 30, 2017 | 11:43 pm PT
In which Vietnamese beauty decade do you belong?

From the traditional teeth blackening in the early 20th century to differing beauty trends between the North and the South as the country was separated during the Vietnam War, this time-lapse video shows how Vietnamese makeup styles have changed over the last 100 years.

Famous for their 100 Years of Beauty videos, Cut has chosen Vietnamese women’s fashion for their latest instalment. Helping to visualize the trends is Isabelle Du, Miss Vietnam USA 2017.

The 102-second video starts in the 1910s, when the tradition of tooth painting was widely practiced. For centuries it had been considered sexually appealing and a sign of healthy teeth.

It goes on to display the Western fashion influence, French in particular, over the women’s looks between the 1920s and 1940s.

By the time the Vietnam War begun in the mid-1950s, the screen is split into two panels, as so did the country and its beauty trends. While women of the North preferred to keep it simple and natural, their counter-parts in the South were busy keeping up with the ever-changing hairstyles and dark eye-lining makeup from the West.

The country’s unification in 1975 ended the beauty separation and the preference for traditional long hair came back, with little modern twists: curls, waves and back to straight. 

After 10 hours online, the Cut video has drawn nearly half a million views and almost a thousand shares on Facebook.

If you want to explore the clothing styles and the evolution of the national attire, ao dai, check out this video and this photo article.

 
 
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