It's very strange that the characters who are supposed to look "romantic" (like Irene, June and Helene) have 1960's lipstick on, which leaned toward a pale, frosted spectrum.
In the black and white photography, this almost erases their mouths alltogether, and gives them kind of a lipless, "fishy" appearance.
It almost makes them look dead! Yuck.
I'm watching on a hi-def tv and it doesn't look that way to me.
The hair is indeed distracting, though, especially the fake, tacked-on ponytails in the back. June's hair is particularly bad. She is meant to have long hair, but it looks as though they used a hairpiece/wiglet added to her own hair in the back. You can still see her short hair in the back with the hairpiece hanging over it (reminds me of Barbara Stanwick's bad wiglets in the Big Valley). It's not a great look. Why didn't they just use full wigs? It would have looked so much better.
(And don't get me started on the beehives!)
That was my observation as well. Irene and June both looked like 1960s Dolly Birds wearing old fashioned dresses.
And the hair was very much like I used to wear mine in the 60s (after a visit to the hairdresser. I could never put it up that way myself.)
Love is never having to say you're sober.
This is one of my pet peeves, not just for The Forsyte Saga but for many other period dramas as well. I think the first time I noticed it was in "The Go-Between", with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.
It had seemed quite authentic up to the point that Julie returns to her family out of a copse of trees, and we plainly see the strap of her VERY modern bra! I was shocked (I think I was in college). This was what we now call a "gaffe" or something like it. Never mind the white lipstick! This was much worse for an authenticity freak.
The explanation I've always received as to why most period dramas are filled with glaring errors regarding wardrobe and makeup (esp. the womens'), up until the early to mid-1970's, is that they didn't want to depart too far from the fashionable looks of the current period, so as not to alienate viewers. Think of the liberties taken in "Gone With the Wind" or "Wuthering Heights"--ye gods! By the way, one film I can recall that got the 1880's right: "Gaslight", with Ingrid Bergman. SHE was born to wear those fashions.
I understand that departure, from a producer's POV...but I don't CARE about them! I only care about my own suspension of disbelief. It infuriates me when I see ANY kind of makeup on a woman prior to the 1920's! Probably the first ones to totally disregard these things was the Merchant-Ivory crew, which made their films so amazing, along with other aspects.
And then you get films like "Sense and Sensibility", in which the women had to wear, not only period corsets, but to train themselves into them, as young women in the late 1700's would have had to! Now that is dedication in acting and accuracy in film making!
She deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die.