Top Beauty Fashion

Top beauty icons. Everr.

The following women have become inspirational to me because of their impeccable grace. Whereas many women on TV are hailed as 'beauties' for simply good make up jobs, the ones featured below not only possess immense natural beauty, they also have the intelligence and passion to take risks and manage their lives independently. A ranking is not possible.

Sophia Loren was the world's Marilyn Monroe in the late 1950s-1960s. She grew up in poverty in Mussolini's Italy and during WWII she was living in a town continuously bombed by the Allies.

When she got into Hollywood she was critiqued incessantly for her atypically sharp features and told to lose weight. She rejected all this inane pecking to later win an Oscar and become one of history's most celebrated beauties.

Hollywood is 20x bigger than Bollywood in terms money--billions made on $12 movie tickets in the US, DVD releases, etc. Yet in terms of number of movies made and audience figures, Bollywood is far larger. The Bollywood movie market expands past India throughout Asia as a whole, the Middle East, Africa, and Western viewers including the huge South Asian diaspora in the US and UK. Aishwarya Rai is basically the face of Bollywood. She is a former architecture student-turned Miss World and has been a critical element in promoting the Bollywood industry abroad. She was named a TIME magazine Most Influential Person in 2004, she is a UN Microcredit spokesperson and pledged her famous eyes to the Eye Bank Association of India.

Salma Hayek already had a successful career in Mexico as a soap opera and movie actress, including a role in Miracle Alley--the highest acclaimed film in Mexican cinema history. In the 1990s she left her comfortable life there to create a name for herself in the US, hardly speaking English when she first arrived. After acting as the quintessential beautiful girl in numerous movies, she produced and acted in Frida in 2003, a biopic on the famous Mexican artist. She stopped waxing her face completely to grow out her own facial hair and earned an Academy Award Best Actress nomination for her role.

She is now CEO of her production company, Ventarosa, and has deals with the ABC network to produce TV shows geared towards the Latino audience. She is the force behind Ugly Betty, which was originally a soap opera in Colombia. In December 2008 Salma Hayek was named one of the Top 25 Smartest People in TV by Entertainment Weekly, a title well earned considering her vision. You think that's enough? She also testified before the Senate supporting the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, and after having a baby, joined forces with Pampers in a UNICEF campaign providing tetanus vaccinations in underdeveloped countries.

In the 1970s most black models had great trouble getting work, yet Somali-born Iman became an international fashion muse working with the most elite names such as Yves Saint Laurent, Versace, and Donna Karen. Compelled by the difficulties she faced finding the right makeup to suit her complexion in the beauty/fashion industry, Iman created her own cosmetics line in 1994. IMAN Cosmetics was the first line of its kind specifically targeted to non-white women that beauty powerhouses like L'Oreal and Covergirl historically neglected. She has since wrote a book The Beauty of Color designed as a guide for women of all shades to help accentuate their own unique features. Currently Iman is an executive producer for the Canadian version of Project Runway, and has designed her own fashion line, Global Chic, inspired by global style trends.