Marisa Mell - A Natural Beauty!

This beautiful picture from 1967 of Marisa Mell is one of the rare pictures where the photographer was able to capture her amazing notorious emerald green eyes in exquisite detail! What makes this picture even more special is the condition of the skin of Marisa Mell laced with freckels, blemishes and unevenness, which nowadays would be covered with thick layers of foundation or make-up or removed altogether with Photoshop to make a smooth even looking unnatural skin or face, making it all very artificial! Not in the 60's, the faces of actresses as nature created them were accepted as natural beauties by the public. We have come a long way since then in accepting what is seen as beautiful and personally I think it is mostly not for the better!

Messalina (Fumetti per Adulti)

Marisa Mell was regarded in her days as a classical beauty like Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot. Thick dark auburn hair, cat like emerald green eyes and a voluptuous sensual mouth with big inviting lips. Every mans wet dream! So when she arrived in Rome in the mid '60's she was quickly spotted by the incrowd and finding a job in the movie business was easy. In a very short time she rose to fame becoming a weekly staple in the yellow press with her movies and especially with her love affaires with very famous men. In short Marisa Mell became a house hold name in Italian society. Everybody knew her name and face! So it isn't strange that her image also found its way in other media outlets than the movies. In the past the Marisa Mell Blog had entries about Marisa Mell being the template for comic book characters like Satanka. or Lucifera. This time her sexy image has been used to grace a cover of an Italian fumetti called "Messalina". The cover is from issue 101 of the series. Messalina is the wife of the Roman emperor Claudius. Because her husband is regarded as a retard and stammerer, not capable to satisfy his wife in bed, she is always on the look out for sexual adventures in ancient Rome with men and women from different races while plotting her way through Roman politics to satisfy her lust for power often using torture and gruesome murders as her wapon. The series was, like many other fumetti heroines, a  big success from 1966 until 1974 running for 185 issues. Today these individual issues fetch top prices at the secondary market and are hard to find in prestine condition. The photo of Marisa Mell is a promotional still used to promote her movie "...dopo di che uccide il maschio e lo divora" starring Stephen Boyd as her counterpart.

The Eyes of ...

Marisa Mell was known in the movie industry as "...the women with the most beautiful emerald green eyes in the world...". Almost everyone who saw them, looked into them, fell in love with them. Since her early childhood, people were attracked to those eyes and commented on them. She grew used to it that this happened, but she was also smart enough to use them into her advantage to propel her appeal and career by charcoaling them heavily. Although it was high fashion to do this in the 60's, Marisa Mell did it untill the end of her life knowing that her eyes would keep their appeal untill the very end, no matter what happened.

Having green eyes against the world population is rare but having emerald green eyes is even rarer. The problem with emerald green eyes, as with a lot of other rare eye colors like a heavenly blue à la Paul Newman, is to catch their beauty in a picture or on film. Like real color gems they need the best light to give back their stunning beauty. Normal day light or artificial light is often not enough and you get some kind of color that is only a 10th of their real power and beauty. The angle of lighting needs to be in a perfect angle to be reflexed by the iris in the eye. So it is very difficult to find a photo of Marisa Mell on the cover where you can admire those emerald eyes. One of the rare exceptions is this German language magazine "Revue" from the beginning of the '60's. Here you can see how beautiful and intense they were. The photographer did a hell of a good job to catch those beauties in a time before computer enhancement and manipulation. This is nature at it's best.

For the poster of the movie "Infamia" from 1974 or in it's original title "La Moglie Giovane", her eyes were used as the central piece to attrack an audience to this movie.