Romantic Love and Personal Beauty / Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities

by Henry T. Finck

One reason why tourists are more impressed by the prevalence of beauty in southern than in northern regions, is because the working classes are more beautiful in the South than in the North; and the working classes, of course, constitute the vast majority of the population everywhere. “In northern countries,” says Mr. Lecky, “the prevailing cast of beauty depends rather on colour than on form. It consists chiefly of a freshness and delicacy of complexion which severe labour and constant exposure necessarily destroy, and which is therefore rarely found in the highest perfection among the very poor. But the southern type is essentially democratic. The fierce rays of the sun only mellow and mature its charms. Its most perfect examples may be found in the hovel as in the palace, and the effects of this diffusion of beauty may be traced both in the manners and the morals of the people.”

Another advantage to the study and development of Personal Beauty lies in the fact, noted by Ruskin, “that in climates where the body can be more openly and frequently visited by sun and weather, the nude both comes to be regarded in a way more grand and pure, as not of necessity awakening ideas of base kind (as pre-eminently with the Greeks), and also from that exposure receives a firmness and sunny elasticity very different from the silky softness of the clothed nations of the North.”

(2) Hair.—"That noble beauty," says Winckelmann, “which consists not merely in a soft skin, a brilliant complexion, wanton or languishing eyes, but in the shape or form, is found more frequently in countries which enjoy a uniform mildness of climate.” “This difference shows itself even in the hair of the head and of the beard, and both in warm climates have a more beautiful growth even from childhood, so that the greater number of children in Italy are born with fine curling hair, which loses none of its beauty with increasing years. All the beards, also, are curly, ample, and finely shaped; whereas those of the pilgrims who come to Rome from the other side of the Alps are generally, like the hair of their heads, stiff, bristly, straight, and pointed.”

Nevertheless, the hair is the blonde’s one feature in which, so far as the head itself is concerned, she may dispute the supremacy with the brunette. Light hair is finer than dark hair, and there is more of it to the square inch; and as for the colour, who will say that a girl with “golden locks which make such wanton gambols” is inferior in beauty to one who is “robed in the long night of her deep hair”?

But if the positive tests of Beauty—Colour, Lustre, Smoothness, Delicacy, etc.—do not permit us to give the preference to dark hair, it is otherwise when we come to the negative tests. A fine head of blond hair may be as beautiful as a head of brown hair, but it is not so apt to be beautiful; it has a tendency to become “stiff, bristly, straight, and pointed.” There are various reasons for believing that light hair as a rule is not so healthy, not so well-nourished, as dark hair. Every reader must have noticed among his friends that the blondes are much more likely than the brunettes to complain of dry and refractory hairs, and difficulty in keeping them in shape.

“The end of long hair is usually lighter in colour than its beginning,” as Professor Kollmann remarks: “at a distance from the skin the hairs lose their natural oil as well as the nourishing sap which comes from their roots.” This implies that the colour of the hair becomes darker with increasing vigour and vitality. We have seen that the same is true of the colour of animals in general, the healthiest being the most vividly coloured, and the males commonly darker than the less vigorous females; and as for plants, who has not noticed how easy it is to trace the course of an invisible brooklet in a meadow, not only by the greater luxuriance, but the much darker colour of the grass which lines its banks?

Once more, we know that old age, great sorrow, terror, headaches, or insanity, diminish the pigmentary matter in the hair and make it lighter—gray or white; and that by frequently brushing blond hair we not only make it more glossy and shapely, but at the same time darker.

Red hair is probably an abnormal variety of blond hair, since it does not occur among the darker races. It is disliked not only because it is so often associated with freckles, but because it is commonly dry, coarse, and bristly. The Brahmins were forbidden to marry a red-haired woman; and the populace of most countries, confounding moral with æsthetic impressions, accuses red-haired people of various shortcomings. “Sandy hair, when well brushed and kept glossy with the natural oil of the scalp, changes to a warm golden tinge. I have seen,” says the author of the Ugly Girl Papers, “a most obnoxious head of colour so changed by a few years’ care that it became the admiration of the owner’s friends, and could hardly be recognised as the withered, fiery locks once worn.”

An American newspaper paragraph, for the truthfulness of which I cannot vouch, recently stated that twenty-one men in Cincinnati, who had married red-haired women, were found to be colour-blind. A person who is colour-blind mistakes red for black.

(3) Eyes.—But it is when we leave the scalp that the superiority of dark over light hair becomes most manifest. That black eyelashes and eyebrows are infinitely more beautiful than light-coloured ones, is admitted without a dissentient voice; and it is needless to add that brunettes, whether gray or black-eyed, are almost certain to have dark eyelashes, while blondes are almost certain not to have them. Hence the painting of light eyelashes has been a common artifice among all nations and at all times; and Mrs. Haweis goes so far as to sanction the use of nasty gray hair powder because it “makes the eyebrows and eyelashes appear much darker than they really are.” I have, however, seen black eyelashes on several young ladies who could hardly be classed as brunettes, and who assured me on their conscience that they had not dyed them. Can it be possible that Sexual Selection (i.e. the æsthetic overtone in Romantic Love) is endeavouring to evolve a type of Beauty in which golden locks will be allowed to remain, while the eyelashes will be changed to black? The only objection to this surmise is that the hair in other parts of the face (chin and upper lip), though rarely of the same colour as that on the scalp, is almost always lighter in hue. But, whether or not Love can accomplish the miracle of making black lashes universal, the fact remains that they are in all cases a thousand times more charming than yellow or red lashes, and also more apt to be long and delicately curved, coyly veiling the mysterious lustre and fire of the iris.