Farrah Fawcett is considered one of the definitive sex symbols of the 1970s, with her athletic figure and layered, feathered blonde hair, which became a global obsession.

She cemented her status when she began starring in Charlie’s Angels in 1976, the same year she featured on a poster wearing her now-iconic red swimsuit, which became the best-selling poster of all time and is often called “the most famous poster in history,” selling over 12 million copies.

“The reason I decided to do a poster was, well, if you don’t sign a deal to do one, somebody does one anyway, and then you get nothing,” she said in 1977.

Bo Derek became an instant star after her small but impactful role in the 1979 film 10 opposite Dudley Moore. The film’s most famous scene featured Bo wearing a gold swimsuit with her hair in beaded braids while running in slow motion on the beach.

It made her a sex symbol overnight, a title she didn’t shy away from. “It wasn’t that big of a problem for me, because I never took it seriously,” she told Fox News. “It was always just a job, like you put on your uniform. Back then, it was a time where we had to cross boundaries in sexuality and sensuality in movies. Whose gonna do a nude scene first? Who’s going to do this first? Now, you look back and what was all the fuss about?”

Cheryl Ladd landed a role on Charlie’s Angels, playing Kris Munroe, the younger sister of Farrah Fawcett’s character, when she left the show in 1977, and with it came her own rise to bombshell status.

Cheryl became the ‘girl next door’ type with her wholesome yet glamorous image with feathered hair and sun-kissed skin, and was often featured in bikinis, swimsuits, and tight clothing on the show.

While others saw Cheryl as a sex symbol, she didn’t feel the same way. “I felt like I didn’t like to be a sex symbol that much,” she told Fox News. “Some of the outfits I was wearing, and I didn’t do nudity or anything like that, but still, it was like, mm. But when you’re a young woman, you don’t always make the right choices. And that’s a learning process.”

Pam Grier redefined what it meant to be a sex symbol in the 1970s, blending her action-hero roles (Coffy, Foxy Brown) with sex appeal, which stood her apart from the Farrah Fawcett’s and Bo Derek’s of the ’70s.

While Pam earned pin-up status for pulling razor blades out of her afro and wielding a sawed-off shotgun in a tight dress in Coffy, she claimed it came down to one thing. “They kept saying, ‘Oh she’s so pretty, she’s so sexy’ because I was thin,” she told PeopleTV’s Couch Surfing.

Cybill Shepherd was one of the original faces of the L’Oréal ‘Because I’m Worth It’ campaign, starting her career as a model before she transitioned to Hollywood. Her film debut in The Last Picture Show brought her instant recognition after the scene of her stripping on a diving board got the film banned in some locations.

In her early roles, she was often cast as the ‘dream girl’ and later reflected on her youth, saying, “Beauty is power.”