Marilyn Monroe (a.k.a. Norma Jeane Mortenson) will eternally be an icon in pop culture, known for her charisma, seductive half-smiles and bubbly personality.
While we know the real Marilyn Monroe was very different to the person we saw on screen (in fact, the star harboured many insecurities like any average person would) there was something magnetic about her that could not be ignored.
It’s a phenomenon fans on TikTok have zoomed in on, called ‘The Marilyn Monroe Effect’, essentially, how her body language completely changed the way she presented herself to the world.
It’s something that was chronicled by the wife of Marilyn’s personal photographer, Amy Greene. Recalling a day she was walking in New York with Marilyn, both dressed down in casual clothes, going incognito, Monroe asked Amy Greene: ‘Do you want to see me become her?’
“I didn’t know what she meant but I just said ‘Yes’ — and then I saw it. I don’t know how to explain what she did because it was so very subtle, but she turned something on within herself that was almost like magic,” Amy Greene wrote.
“And suddenly cars were slowing, and people were turning their heads and stopping to stare. They were recognizing that this was Marilyn Monroe as if she pulled off a mask or something, even though a second ago nobody noticed her. I had never seen anything like it before.”
Monroe’s arsenal of body language tricks encompassed everything from the open and strategic angling of her body, maintaining eye contact and projecting power and self-assurance in her movements.
It’s the ‘eye contact’ element that has TikTok in raptures, with fans sharing an example of her signature ‘triangle’ eye trick to snag your crush from across the room.
The TikTok has been posted multiple times, a video of Monroe in the film Niagara using her eyes to draw in a man and devastate him with one look.
Watch it here:
A particularly charged moment of the 1953 movie, we can see Monroe quickly redirect her eyesight in three directions.
The triangle method involves:
- Looking at the right eye
- Switching to the left eye
- Dropping the gaze down to their lips for a moment
- Looking back up into both eyes briefly, before averting the gaze again
It’s important to note that the video is a slowed down version so people can see how it’s done. You can see the maestro at work in real time in this clip from the movie at the 2:00 timestamp.
“It’s worked for me everytime,” one user shared on the TikTok video.
“She didn’t even look at me, still got butterflies,” another added.
Would you try this one at home? It might be worth practising on a friend before breaking it out on a crush, for fear of looking a little bizarre if it’s not subtle enough.
But safe to say, we might need to be taking more seduction cues from the ladies in old films, particularly Monroe, as she was a master.
