This year, Kate Middleton wrote her own princess diary

London: As 2023 comes to a close, Allure dives into those moments when beauty took center stage this year: the trends, the people, and the technologies that filled our feeds and captured our imaginations. As always, we’re here to chronicle, to celebrate, and to make sense of it all — or at least try. Welcome to the Year in Beauty.

As history tells us, princess stories come with a lot of baggage. We often associate them with fairy tales, after all. And fairy tales tend to have a dark side. (Just watch season five of The Crown.) Despite all that, we’re perpetually obsessed with princesses and their seemingly-magical lives. We want to luxuriate in the fantasies of their jewels, their gowns, their unblemished skin, their silken hair, and their tiny feet. So it seems like a contradiction to see one as a hard-working senior member of a constitutional monarchy that goes back to William the Conqueror.

On September 22, 2022, the woman formerly known as Kate Middleton officially became the Princess of Wales, making 2023 her first full year in the role. Her title has been used by the monarchy since the 14th century to denote the wife of the Prince of Wales. (It boggles the mind what her social handles could be because she’s also the Duchess of Cambridge, Cornwall, and Rothesay, Countess of Chester and Carrick, and Baroness of Renfrew, not to mention a slew of military titles, including Colonel of the Irish Guards, which is why you might see her with a gold shamrock on her lapel at some events.) The Wales honor was last — and perhaps most famously — held by Princess Diana, but many women have historically been known by the title. Over the past year, Catherine has made the position her own.

“I don’t think it’s a stretch to say she is the most effective Princess of Wales we’ve ever seen,” says Sally Bedell Smith, royal expert and author of George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy. “Obviously, the standards for being a Princess of Wales now are very different from when Queen Mary [Prince William’s great great grandmother] was Princess of Wales. Diana was very high-profile and she embraced causes, like AIDS, that were taboo. She was very venturesome and bold. But what she did was eroded by the clear unhappiness and discord in the relationship she had with Charles. She was effective, but it was more sporadic and she certainly wasn’t disciplined.” That word may distinguish Catherine more than any other. Appearance discipline, message discipline, parenting discipline. Whatever you may think of the royals — and negative impressions abound both inside and outside the UK, especially in former colonies — few would deny that the current Princess of Wales takes her role very seriously. “Will and Kate are clearly a team and they are working together,” says Smith. “Kate is very aware of not overshadowing him. She’s very canny in the way she projects her image.”

Because the British royal family rarely do interviews and tend to keep their personal lives and opinions to themselves, most of what we understand about Catherine comes from what she projects publicly. Her beauty and fashion choices are purposely encoded with meaning, underscoring the perceptions we already have of her — mostly from carefully choreographed public appearances at worthy charities — as empathetic, glamorous, and yet somehow one with the people. Everything about her image is intentional from her hair and makeup to her jewelry and fashion.

Many have naturally compared Catherine to her late mother-in-law, Diana, whose stunning sapphires she often wears, but she also takes her cues from Queen Elizabeth II. And similar to the late Queen, Catherine often dresses in vibrant colors so that your eye immediately goes to her on any balcony or reviewing stand or other public platform. The bright green Andrew Gn dress she wore for Trooping the Color in June and the candy apple red Catherine Walker cape with a matching Jane Taylor hat that she wore at a ceremony for the president of South Korea in November are two of the most memorable recent examples.

“She will have learned a lot from Elizabeth about this idea of being appropriate, being very respectful in your dressing, dressing to honor the occasion [green was for the Irish Guards and red for the South Korean flag] and using symbolism in your dressing without doing anything that’s too far-fetched or that will draw controversy,” explains Bethan Holt, fashion director at The Telegraph. “She’s never going to be a natural fashion communicator in the way that Diana was because she’s got a very different story to Diana. But there are some trends, [like] at one point Diana had enough of ballgowns and just wanted to wear suits and trousers and we’ve definitely seen Kate take that approach.” The purple power pantsuit she chose for an event promoting her initiative with the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood is the most recent case in point.

Fashion commentators Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez frequently write about Catherine on their website, Tom + Lorenzo, and similarly feel that she draws from the late Queen. Unlike Diana, who is often an easier comparison to make, Catherine embraces tradition and duty with a genuine smile, or at least a convincing one. There are hints of her own preferences, which tend toward the sporty and less formal, in her workaday ensembles, incorporating both designer and off-the-rack pieces, as well as frequent repeats. Marquez notes that she “follows all the rules that she has to follow for every occasion,” with color choice or style elements like pleats as a way of giving something her own spin. Those rules, of course, are legendary, if unwritten: Cleavage is a no-no. Same with open-toe shoes (except in the tropics). Handbags are carried on the left. PDA is frowned upon. And every time Catherine executes one of her balletic deep curtsies, the clip goes viral.

“She’s a company woman through and through,” Fitzgerald says. “She dresses for the firm. She’s always been that way — at least since the wedding. Over the past 10 years, she’s really honed her public image to the point where I think people have an image of her that comes to mind almost immediately when you say her name.”

That image starts with her hair, which by any measure is shiny and bouncy and lush. She has traveled with a hairdresser, Amanda Cook Tucker, on official trips. And her meticulous updos for formal occasions (sometimes capped with the Cambridge Lover’s Knot tiara, one of Diana’s favorites, too) are certainly the work of a skilled hand. But although it seems like Catherine has maintained the same hairstyle over the years, she does occasionally switch things up, including her recent Bardot bangs.

Many of Catherine’s jewelry choices reflect her connection to her late mother-in-law Princess Diana. This mutual favorite is the Cambridge Lover’s Knot tiara, commissioned by Queen Mary.

“If we are to look back over the last decade of Catherine’s hair, you will see how her color, length, and style changes,” says hairstylist Pete Burkill of Josh Wood Colour in London. “But even with those changes, we still have an image of the Kate Middleton look, which, for me, shows how she has found a parting that suits her, a tonal range of colors that suit her, and a styling regime that also suits her.” (As far as products, she is said to use Kérastase Bain Satin shampoo and Lait Vital conditioner.) Burkill’s clients often bring in a reference photo of the princess.

Catherine’s makeup, which, reportedly, she often does herself (even famously on her wedding day) is purposely restrained. Her beauty choices are subtle, employed to emphasize her features without being obvious, which Holt describes as “a very English rose look.” She never wears bright lipstick, for instance, and rarely adds a flourish with a vibrant nail color. In fact, her unusual red manicure on Easter unsettled the British press so much she was accused of breaking royal tradition.

Every single moment of Catherine’s life is photographed, critiqued, and parsed for meaning. And there are no off-ramps when you are Princess of Wales, destined to be queen, married to a future king, and raising three heirs to the throne. This scrutiny is for life. But if the burden can be overwhelming, Catherine hasn’t shown it. What she has done is consistently tailor her every look to the circumstance, not just in what she wears but also in what it represents. At a recent event for World Mental Health Day, for instance, she wore a pair of earrings given to her by the mother of girl who had died by suicide. It was a subtle, but meaningful gesture.

It’s almost like she’s shuffling through the different iterations of Barbie — Sporty Kate, Business Kate, Mom Kate, Military Kate, Church Kate, Princess Kate — in each of her looks. While many love the aspirational images of Catherine in a gown and a tiara at the state function, Fitzgerald feels she’s most alive in an active, outdoorsy situation, whether it’s playing tennis with Roger Federer or riding a bike in Scotland. (She also enjoys cold water swimming, a peculiarly British sport, which mystifies her husband and is exactly what it sounds like.) In those moments she’s one of us, just with perfect hair, and a body sculpted by a workout routine one British magazine labeled “exhausting.” (They said it includes running, weight lifting, cycling, rowing, yoga, and HIIT. They failed to mention those cold plunges, which Catherine herself spoke about on a rugby-themed podcast.) “On a certain level, if Kate could have been a coach at a girls college [one imagines] she would have loved that,” Fitzgerald says. “There’s a part of her that loves that sporting life, to be on a pitch or out on a green somewhere. She comes across as very youthful when she’s doing those more casual events. Her goal from the beginning was to uphold tradition, but to also bridge that gap between the high-end monarchy and the public.”

To both royal watchers and those who don’t generally care about the monarchy, Catherine seems dependable, pretty, appropriate, glamorous. She rarely steps a foot out of line. Her signature qualities, discipline and consistency, are not exactly the stuff of princess stories. But empathy certainly is. And the most cursory look at Catherine interacting with children with special needs or people suffering with addiction, makes it clear that, like Diana, this is her superpower. While to some she can seem a little formal or aloof (by far a minority opinion, at least in the UK), Catherine’s image has become almost symbolic, offering her own hardworking, dutiful version of the Princess of Wales and hinting at her future on the British throne.

“She’s tapping into what the late Queen was,” Holt says. “We always knew no matter what was going on in the world or what wars were erupting or what political controversies there were, she was always there in a brightly colored hat and a brightly colored coat. She was this anchor in a world of chaos. It’s now falling to Kate to be that anchor.”