The Story of L'Inconnue de la Seine

In the early twentieth century, a popular piece of art for the fashionable French home was L'Inconnue de la Seine (translation: “the unknown woman of the Seine”), a completely creepy death-mask (pictured at left) of a young woman whose body had been pulled from the Seine River in Paris, sometime in the 1870s or 1880s. 

As the (somewhat questionable) story goes, a pathologist at the morgue found the unknown woman’s face enchanting, so he made a death mask, a plaster casting of her face. The resulting cast was widely reproduced and became both a popular objet d'art, as well as extremely influential to writers, artists, and indeed young girls who attempted to replicate her (dead) looks.

In 1958, the woman’s face was used on the first CPR doll, dubbed Rescue Annie. Some have thus called hers “the most kissed face of all time,” despite all these kisses occurring roughly eighty years after her death. (Source)