Brunette and Blonde
“In the old time black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir.”
—Shakspere.
Blonde Versus Brunette
Becker tells us that among the ancient Greeks “black was probably the prevailing colour of the hair, though blond is frequently mentioned”; and he adds that both men and women used dyes, and “the blond or yellow hair was much admired.” Mr. Gladstone, in his work on Homer, remarks that “dark hair is a note of the foreigner and of Southern extraction.... I have been assured that, in the Greece of to-day, light hair is still held as indicating the purest Hellenic blood.” According to Winckelmann, “Homer does not even once mention hair of a black colour”; and again: “Flaxen, ξανθὴ hair has always been considered the most beautiful; and hair of this colour has been attributed to the most beautiful of the gods, as Apollo and Bacchus, not less than to the heroes; even Alexander had flaxen hair.”
That the Romans agreed with the Greeks in giving the preference to light hair seems probable from the extensive importations of yellow German hair for the Roman ladies, as also from the fact that “Lucretius, when speaking of the false flatteries addressed to women, quotes one in illustration, namely, that a maiden with black hair is μελίχροος (honey-coloured)—thus ascribing to her a beauty which she does not possess.”
When the fair-haired Teuton overran the South a new motive for preferring blond hair arose, as a writer in the London Standard remarks: “Whatever the feeling of the men, we may be sure that the dark beauties of those climes felt a natural inclination to resemble the wives and daughters of the conqueror, and when we perceive their likenesses again, at the revival of art in Italy, not a black tress is to be seen. Is there a single Madonna not blond?—or ten portraits of women by the great masters? In all the gallery of Titian, we think only of a figure, naked to the waist, in the Uffizi, described as one of his mistresses.... But we know that the blond tint was artificial in a majority of cases—the deep black of eye and brow would show it if no evidence were forthcoming. But evidence turns up at every side... a hundred recipes are found in memoirs, correspondence, and treatises of the time.”
Hear another witness: “Southern Europe,” says Mr. R. G. White, “is peopled with dark-skinned, dark-haired races, and the superior beauty of the blond type was recognised by the painters, who always, from the earliest days, represented angels as of that type. The Devil was painted black so much as a matter of course that his pictured appearance gave rise to a well-known proverb; ordinary mortals were represented as more or less dark; celestial people were white and golden-haired: whence the epithet ‘divinely fair.’”
And the poets were quite as partial as the artists to the light type. Petrarch’s sonnets are addressed to a blue-eyed Laura. Krimhild of the Nibelungenlied is blue-eyed, like Fricka, the Northern Juno, and Ingeborg of the Frithjof’s Saga, and the Danish princess Iolanthe, as Dr. Magnus points out; and in the French folk-songs “the girls are almost as invariably blond as in the songs of Heine,” as a writer in the Saturday Review (1878) remarks, adding that “there is even such an expression as aller en blonde, ‘to go a-wooing,’ which proves the universality of the belief in fair beauties.”
Concerning England, a writer in the Quarterly Review declares that Shakspere mentions black hair only twice throughout his plays; and that in the National Gallery of that date (1853) there was not a single female head with black hair.