This reconstruction has been updated! Find it here.

As many of you tudor-history lovers know, it was so exciting when we finally got confirmation on a portrait of Mary Boleyn. This portrait I’ve used here on the left is actually a copy of that portrait – the confirmed portrait is owned by the crown (and I don’t want a cease and desist from the Queen!), so I’ve used the copy from the public domain. Mary Boleyn was known as the beauty of the Boleyn family. She previously had an affair with Henry VIII before her younger sister Anne married him. There was surprisingly little available about her hair color – I always thought she was blonde (I’m sure from the popular Scarlett Johansson portrayal in The Other Boleyn Girl). However, the only source describing her hair color was that it was “lighter than her sisters”, which was said to be a deep shade of auburn. I also had some fun adding a few beauty marks/freckles, which I think adds to some realism in the modern day. As always, I “balanced” the proportions of the face, correcting for some of the known stylizations in portraiture from this era, like the tiny lips. Left Portrait base: Public Domain. Right Portrait base: iStock photo. Created using Photoshop.