Originally published in Pearson's Weekly (C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.) vol.1 #10 (27 Sep 1890).
In a general way, red hair meets with an altogether undeserved amount of ridicule. People whose hair is of some other hue have a way of referring to it as "carrots," and of making a variety of disparaging remarks with regard to the warmth of its colour.
There is a certain shade of fiery red that is not as a rule becoming, but, generally speaking, red hair is, in the writer's opinion, far more beautiful than any other. No other coloured hair shows such a variety of shades in the play of the sunlight, and with the softer sex red hair is usually more abundant than that of darker or lighter colour.
The pity of it is that very often a girl with beautiful auburn or bronze-red hair puts on clothes which, instead of enhancing its charm, present the most violent and unpleasant contrast. No woman, for instance, can look worse dressed than one possessing hair of the shade in question who thinks fit to put on a pale-blue gown, as is, unfortunately, sometimes the case.
A red-haired woman who dresses herself in golden browns, orange-tinted yellows, terra-cotta, and the whole range of such tints as are exemplified in butter-cups, marigolds, Mareschal Neil roses and wallflowers, cannot fail to present a most attractive appearance, even though features may not be positively beautiful.
Titian, Paul Veronese, and others of the old masters, showed in their paintings how they loved golden-red hair, and crowned most of the beautiful female figures which they portrayed upon the canvas with this tint.
History and tradition tell us that some of the most beautiful women the world has ever known possessed red hair. Helen of Troy and Sappho, the passionate poetess of Greece, both had tawny locks. Cleopatra and Fair Rosamond were red-headed women. The two most lovely girls that England ever saw, who took all London by storm in the last century—"The Beautiful Gunnings" as they were called—were red-headed Irish girls, with
Bright tresses which defied
The sun to match them in his noon-day pride.
In Ireland red hair has always been regarded as one of the principal attributes of beauty, more especially by the peasantry. "She's an illigant lady entirely," some ragged loiterer will say, as a good-looking woman passes him, "but sure it's a pity she has not got red hair." An old Irish ditty runs:
Hey! for the apple, ho! for the pear,
But give me the pretty girl with the red hair.
In ancient Rome red was regarded as the most becoming colour for the hair, and Roman beauties would give almost any price for a dye that was guaranteed to change their dark locks to red. Mary Queen of Scots possessed red tresses, and those famous French beauties, Agnes Sorel, Diane of Poictiers, and Gabrielle d'Estrée were also crowned with auburn locks.
The Laura, whom Petrarch has immortalised, attracted him by the colour of her tresses. He first saw her in church clad in a mantle of green, over which her golden red hair fell.
The snare was set amid those threads of gold,
To which Love bound me fast,
he wrote, and in another of his songs he says of his lady-love's hair—
The gold and topaz of the sun on snow
Are shade by the bright hair above those eyes.
Queen Elizabeth was inordinately proud of her beautiful hair, which was of a decided red.
Poets are never tired of dilating upon the delights of "golden tresses" and "raven locks," but "ruddy ringlets" they leave severely alone.
It is no uncommon thing to see advertisements of compounds which will change red hair to some other colour, and many women who should have been proud of the fact that Nature had singled them out from among their kind by bestowing upon them a head-covering of this distinctive and beautiful hue, have spoilt her kind intentions by the application of nostruams which are quite as likely to ruin the hair altogether as to change it to some less pronounced tint.
It is often asserted that red-headed people are more quick-tempered than others. We do not believe that there is one atom of truth in this idea. If ever a red-headed man does lose his temper somebody is pretty sure to remark that you could expect very little else from one with his coloured hair. If a black-haired man allows his wrath to run away with him, the ebullition is not in any way connected with the colour of his hair, though it might be with just as much truth.
The ancient Egyptians had the strongest aversion to red hair that any people have ever had. According to early writers, they used every year to perform with much solemnity the ceremony of burning alive an individual against whom no fault could be found except that his hair was of this, to their ideas, objectionable hue. The victim was selected by the priests at the last moment, and their choice was quite arbitrary—a state of affairs which one would imagine must have led to considerable perturbation in the minds of the red-headed members of the community as the fatal day drew near.
One thing that can be said against red hair is that it is coarser than hair of other shades. Some years ago a German scientist, who spent some of his time, not like his argumentative associates, in splitting hairs, but in counting them, procured tresses of different-coloured hair, cut them all to one length, obtained equal weights of each, and then counted them.
The result of this process was that he established to his entire satisfaction the fact that while an ordinary head of red hair contains but 97,000 separate filaments, one of black has 103,000, of brown 109,000, and of blonde 140,000. But surely 90,000 strands should be enough to satisfy anybody.
Red-headed people have been singled out from the crowd with hair of the many shades of brown that are so common. Nature has set upon them a distinctive hall mark, and one that in this usually gloomy climate of ours is doubly grateful from the change it affords to the monotony that reigns so far as colour of the hair is concerned. For this they should be thankful.