After the length of hair, color is the point 275 of most interest. In reality there are but two colors, black and red. Brown, golden, yellow, etc., are intermediate, the difference in shade being determined by the sulphur and oxygen or carbon which prevails. In black hair, carbon exceeds; in golden hair, sulphur and oxygen. It has been insisted that climate determines the color of hair; that fair-haired people are found north of parallel 48°; brown hair between 48° and 45°; which would include Northern France, Switzerland, Bohemia, Austria, and touch Georgia and Circassia, Canada, and the northern part of Maine; and that below that line come the black-haired races of Spain, Naples, Turkey, etc., etc. But this is easily disproved. Take, for instance, the parallel 50° and follow it round the world. Upon it may be found the curly, golden-haired European; the black, straight hair of the Mongolian and American Indian, and again, in Canada, it will give us the fair-haired Saxon girl. So, then, it is race, and not climate, which determines the color. I am inclined to think, too, that temperament has something to do with it, since we find 276 black-haired Celts, golden-haired Venetians, and fair and black-haired Jews.
The ancient civilized nations passionately admired red hair. Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Turks, and Spaniards have given it to their warriors and beauties. Somehow among the Anglo-Saxon race it has a bad reputation. Both in novels and plays it is common to give the rascal of the plot “villanous red hair;” and in the English school of painters, the traitor Judas is generally distinguished by it. In the East, black is the favorite color, and the Persians abhor a red-haired woman. Light brown or golden hair is the universal favorite. The Greeks gave it to Apollo, Venus, and Minerva. The Romans had such a passion for it that, in the days of the Empire, light hair brought from Germany (to make wigs for Roman ladies) sold for its weight in gold. The Germans themselves, not content with the beautiful hair Nature had given them, made a soap of goat’s tallow and beechwood ashes to brighten the color. Homer loved “blondes,” and Milton and Shakespeare are full of golden-haired beauties, while the 277 pages of the novelist and the galleries of painters, ancient and modern, show the same preference.
Lavater insists greatly on the color of hair as an index to the disposition. “Chestnut hair,” he says, “indicates love of change and great vivacity; black hair, passion, strength, ambition, and energy; fair hair, mildness, tenderness, and judgment.”
Fashion has dressed the hair in many absurd and also in many beautiful forms; but through all changes, curls, floating free and natural, have had a majority of admirers. Some one says that “of all the revolvers aimed at men’s hearts, curls are the most deadly,” and from the persistent instinct of women in retaining them, I am inclined to indorse this statement. The Armenians and some other Asiatics twist the hair into the form of a mitre; the Parthians and Persians leave it long and floating; the Scythians and Goths wear it short, thick, and bristling; the Arabians and kindred people often cut it on the crown. In the South of Europe, “to be in the hair” is a common expression for unmarried girls, because they wear their 278 hair long and flowing, while matrons put it up in a coil at the back of the head.
Until the ninth century in England, Nature pretty much led the fashions in hair-dressing; then plaits turned up on each side of the cheek were introduced; and in the eleventh century the hair all disappeared under the head-dress of that time. Early in the sixteenth century ladies began to “turn up” the hair. Queen Margaret of Navarre frizzed and turned back her abundant locks just as the women of our own day do. The custom, too, that is now prevalent of braiding the hair in two long locks and tying them at the ends with ribbons was a favorite style in the early part of the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century women used powder to such an extent as almost to destroy the color of the hair, and during the past hundred years every possible arrangement and non-arrangement has had a temporary favor.
I have nothing to say about the customs of the present day. If there is any property in which a woman has undisputed right, it is 279 surely in her own hair; and if she chooses to wear it in an unbecoming or inartistic style, it is certainly no one’s business that I can perceive. Assuredly not the men’s, since I have already shown that they, either through inability or selfishness, decline to wear the thick, flowing locks with which Nature crowns manly strength and beauty, and which are all women’s admiration.
The majority of women have a natural taste in this matter, and very few are so silly as to sacrifice their beauty to fashion. Two or three rules are fundamental in all arrangements of the hair: one is that a superabundance at the back of the head always imparts an animal expression; another, that it is peculiarly ugly to sweep the whole forehead bare. The Greeks, supreme authorities on all subjects of beauty and taste, were never guilty of such an atrocity. In all their exquisite statues the hair is set low. A third is that “bands” are the most trying of all coiffures, and never ought to be adopted except by faces of classic beauty. To add them to a round, merry face with a nose retroussé is as absurd as to put a 280 Doric frieze on an irregular building. A general and positive one is that all hair is spoiled, both in quality and color, by oiling, for it takes from it that elasticity and lightness which is its chief charm and characteristic; the last (which I have no hope ladies will heed just at present) is, never to hide the natural form of the head.