Elisabeth’s finest attribute was her long auburn hair. It was taken care of by her personal hairdresser, who used to work for the theater. She plaited the Empresses’ hair to great effect, turning it into the semblance of a crown. Her hairstyle became Elisabeth’s trademark. The hair was washed once every three weeks, taking all day to dry, with the strands of hair being tied to the ceiling to prevent the Empress having horrible headaches because of the weight. Meanwhile the Empress bathed in milk, as her classical education told her this is what Cleopatra did.

Elisabeth never ate much and, like many young women today, was on a constant diet. She rejected the fat “wholesome” food that had been served for ages in the Habsburg court. As etiquette demands that all guests stop eating when the Empress has finished her dinner, many of the courtiers were horrified at the lack of appetite of Elisabeth. Often large flocks of young hungry courtiers descended on Vienna after a dinner at court, giving rise to Vienna’s famous bakeries or konditiorei.

Limiting her public appearances to only the most necessary, Elisabeth upheld a mysterious image. Aware that in her thirties she was at the height of her beauty she had many photographs taken in the famous studios of Vienna. Plus the famous courtpainter Frans Winterhalter made a few paintings on commission, costing a fortune. After that she always wore veils and used fans to hide her face. Artists were forced to take the photographs and the commissioned pictures by Winterhalter as a basis to produce their own drawings, paintings and statues. And thus to the public she always remained thirty. Only her deathmask showed Elisabeth in old age.

Elisabeth liked to think of herself as a modern woman, and in this identified herself more with bourgeoisie (the rising class at that moment) and less with aristocracy. She followed certain bourgeoisie ideals, like motherhood, and the woman as a purely private person (as opposed to men being in the public sphere). This was unheard of in the traditional Habsburg Court, where women like Empress Maria Theresa had been far to busy with political intrigue to take care of their own children. This was often left to the grandmother. Naturally, in Elisabeth's younger years this led to conflicts with Archduchesse Sophie, who maintained the Empress was neglecting her duty.

Of course, as we have seen before, this non-political stance was only an image Elisabeth maintained and she was not above political machinations herself, as her involvement with Hungary clearly showed.

Elisabeth also flirted with classical liberalism, even though this was in direct contradiction to her opinion of herself as a non-political person. The Empress was probably influenced by the German liberalism that had found its way into Bavaria, where it was tolerated because the Bavarian court saw an attack on Prussia and especially Bismarck in it. This political affiliation of the Empress could have been viewed as treason in the absolutist court of Vienna, and thus she hid it well. Yet in her poems she often referred to her preferences. Elisabeth had them stored for safekeeping in the republic of Swisterland to be opened in the latter part of this century. And her political influence on her son, Rudolph, who was rumored to have been sympathetic to the Liberalist movement, must have been considerable.