What did Cleopatra look like?

Even though paintings and movies often depict Cleopatra as a great beauty, historians do not have very much information about how she actually looked, states Smithsonian Magazine. In the images that survive on ancient coins, the Egyptian queen is average looking and portrayed with masculine features.

There are no surviving busts of Cleopatra dating from her period, so coins and descriptions written by ancient historians are the only ways to tell what the queen looked like. Many of them depict her with a prominent nose and curly hair. Plutarch states that the queen had an irresistible charm and a sweetness in the tone of her voice.