One thing about beauty standards is that they change drastically over time. That does not seem to have occurred to the good people at Netflix, however.
The platform just released first looks at the third film in its series Enola Holmes, set in the 1800s and starring Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown.
But fans couldn't help but notice a lack of attention to certain details—namely, Brown's period-inaccurate fingernails.
The film series centers on the titular characters, who is the kid sister of legendary detective Sherlock Holmes and a mystery-cracker in her own right.
So we're very much in Victorian England in these films, right? The first installment, released in 2020, took place in 1884, but you wouldn't know it to look at Brown in the stills, especially when it comes to her meticulously manicured nails.
In the stills, Holmes' nails are right out of a 2026 nail salon: almond-shaped acrylics with a gel polish, none of which existed in the Victorian era. By a long shot.
And that isn't the only period inaccuracy people noticed: Brown's obviously enhanced lips felt out of sync for the time as well, and drew quite a bit of mockery.
Of course, Brown and anybody else are free to enhance or alter their appearance in whatever way they see fit, and there's no reasonable basis on which to say Brown doesn't look gorgeous.
But Enola Holmes seems to be the latest victim of a phenomenon that's well-known by this point, often called "iPhone face" or "Instagram face" or sometimes even "TikTok face."
It's basically the long-standing issue of actors, especially but definitely not only women, having faces that don't really fit with the period they're performing in.
Whether it's surgical enhancements, Botox smoothness, injected lips or perhaps especially all these dang veneers Hollywood people won't stop getting, it often makes a period piece feel like you're watching really opulent community theatre or something. It's just a bit off!
But it also points to an arguably even more annoying trend in Hollywood: simply churning out content without giving it the due diligence and attention to detail it actually deserves.
And the Enola Holmes stills left a lot of fans deeply annoyed.
Many blamed the influence of another Netflix character, Penelope Featherington on Bridgerton, who also had a pretty infamous fingernail-inaccuracy uproar on that show.
Decades down the road we will all be able to instantly identify a film made in the 2020s. Just, you know, not for the right reasons...
@thekalenallen/Threads
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