....idiots

The BBC's Jeremy Grange tells the full story in a new post for the BBC. The short version goes like this: The body of a drowned woman was pulled from the Seine in Paris in the last 1800s. A pathologist was so smitten with the unknown woman's face that he made a plaster cast of it. That became a death mask that was sold all over the country.

It had Mona Lisa's smile. Poets and writers used the mask as a muse. And year later, a toy maker was asked to create a CPR doll. He needed a face for the body, and he remembered seeing a mask in his grandparents' home. That mask, of course, was the unknown woman of the Seine, or the "Inconnue." The toy maker thought it would be perfect for the CPR doll. And Resusci Anne came into existence.

https://theworld.org/stories/2013-10-21/heres-story-behind-most-kissed-face-world