On Blondes

by Joanna Pitman

  A distinct shift was occurring in Europe and had already begun to spell an end to the supremacy of the blonde. Italy was losing its leading position in arts and letters to a growing French influence in both political and cultural spheres which was to last until the early nineteenth century. French artists of the early seventeenth century such as Simon Vouet, Philippe de Champaigne and the Le Nain brothers were painting with greater naturalism, clarity and calm, and with a cooler colouring. They were moving away from the heavily idealised Baroque styles of northern Italy towards a type of classical painting in which Poussin was beginning to set the standard. Although Poussin spent most of his life in Rome, he has been acknowledged as the undisputed leader of French art in le grand siécle and the standard-bearer of classicism. Poussin and his fellow French painters produced more rational images, reflecting the rationalism of French contemporary thought. They worked for patrons who were members of the educated bourgeoisie: merchants, bankers and civil servants. Though less influential and magnificent than the aristocracy, these men nevertheless played a powerful role in French cultural life. Poussin’s genius, his intellectual depth and formal mastery, appealed to these men of taste and learning, and his paintings reflect their appreciation of the concept of the honnéte home , the man of virtue and honour, unreliant on fripperies and vanities. His figures swoon less than those of his Italian predecessors. His angels appear in more human guise, without the aid of clouds and radiances. Their faces are more lucidly realistic. And they are predominantly dark-haired. Poussin’s biblical paintings – some of his most beautiful and rarefied images – and his Arcadian works are peopled with the brown-, the black- and the auburn-haired. Although blondes of course still appeared in his and others’ paintings, it could be argued that Poussin and the French painters of this period brought to an end the extreme fetishised cult of the blonde.

  The court painters of Louis XIV, men such as Charles Lebrun and Pierre Mignard, showed in their portrayals of the pompous atmosphere of Versailles how the key personages of the aristocracy, the most powerful men and the most beautiful women, were all fashionably dark-haired. Louis XIV himself wore dark wigs in his early years on the throne and his two key mistresses were dark. Madame de Montespan had herself painted variously as a dark temptress and as a dark Goddess Diana, and Madame de Fontanges, ‘beautiful as an angel, stupid as a basket’, likewise stared appealingly out of a facial frame of dark curls. In matters of taste and style, the French were setting the fashion and the rest of Europe followed.

  The new prominence given to the dark-haired was assisted by the work of a number of painters from northern Europe, figures such as Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Vermeer, whose paintings took on a new and penetrating intimacy which reflected the realities of female beauty. Blonde hair was on the way out. Dark hair was the new pinnacle of beauty.

  By the second half of the seventeenth century, England too had caught on to the new fashions from across the Channel and blonde hair lost its aura of exclusivity. Ingredients for the most powerful blonde dyes, once the property only of the wealthy, had fallen in price. Blonding hair was becoming a bourgeois habit.

  Samuel Pepys, that invaluable chronicler of London manners and mores of the seventeenth century, gives us some early indications of blonde hair going out of fashion. In March 1665, Pepys’s wife, Elizabeth, acquired a pair of blonde hair-pieces. Pepys was not pleased. ‘This day my wife begun to wear light-coloured locks, quite white almost, which, though it makes her look very pretty, yet not being natural, vexes me, that I will not have her wear them.’ Two years later, Elizabeth was still wearing her blonde hair-pieces. ‘. . . and so away with my wife, whose being dressed this day in fair hair did make me so mad, that I spoke not one word to her in our going, though I was ready to burst with anger . . . and so took coach, and took up my wife, and in my way home discovered my trouble to my wife for her white locks, swearing by God several times, which I pray God forgive me for, and bending my fist, that I would not endure it’ (11 May 1667). Pepys returned home and went ‘without supper to bed, vexed’. The following day they argued again about the blonde hair and Elizabeth eventually promised, not before extracting some money from her husband to buy lace, that she would never again wear them while he lived.

  Arch-social-climber that he was, Pepys had realised that fake blonde hair was by now considered cheap. It had cascaded too far down the social scale for his snobbish antennae not to be offended by it. The Earl of Sandwich, his employer, had a painting on his wall of a sophisticated titled beauty, her pale face framed with tumbling bunches of dark curls. This, Pepys realised, was what ladies of superior birth and background wore.

  For the fashionable Restoration beauty, dark hair was now securely in vogue. In the late seventeenth century Sir Peter Lely, whose portraits can be interpreted as a barometer of contemporary attitudes to beauty, painted a series of stylish society ladies, almost all of whom linger palely, their eyelids sensuously lowered beneath a torrent of cascading dark brown or black curls. His portrait of Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland, painted in 1670, shows one of the most flagrantly sensual women at court who became the archetype, for Lely and in the eyes of posterity, of the dark-haired Restoration Beauty.

  Such glossy dark hair was not itself acquired without the help of a little artifice. The contemporary Ladies’ Guide listed numerous recipes for dyes to create the sort of black hair that would set off a fine pale-rose complexion. The most expensive ones, requiring ‘powder of gold’, once again set up barriers to protect the wealthy in their chosen displays from the hordes of bourgeois imitators. And soon dark hair was superseded in England by the fashion for wigs, fantastically expensive handmade pieces of sculpture which gave the rich another chance to display their means. These had come into fashion first for men when Charles 11 finally reached the throne in 1660 and his own mane of curly black hair turned grey. Wigs were initially dark (the king is said to have had a magnificent wig made out of samples from the pubic hair of his numerous amorous conquests) but before long, following the French fashion, they were worn powdered grey or white. By this time English ladies had abandoned the messy business of dyeing and opted instead for extravagantly powdered wigs. It is at this point at the end of the seventeenth century that we enter a period of extreme trichological fantasy and filth. Wigs were very expensive. In 1700 a fine wig sold for £140, seventy times a farm worker’s annual wage. Many of the criminals sentenced at the Old Bailey were specialist wig thieves. But, in spite of attacks from thieves, the rich continued to display their wealth on their heads. As wig prices gradually fell during the eighteenth century, moneyed ladies turned up the competitive heat by wearing ever more elaborately mountainous hairstyles, rigged up on wire frames two or three tiers high. These were decorated with swags of false hair, thickly dusted with fine white flour and then trimmed with yards of silk ribbon, ostrich feathers, beads, pearls, pieces of fruit and fresh flowers in concealed bottles of water, shaped to fit the sides of the scalp. On top of all this the most ruthlessly fashionable added little figurines in blown glass, ships in full sail, horses, chariots, pigs with their litters or even scenes recreating allegorical poems or great battle victories of the American wars.

  Such elaborate displays took many hours to create and, once dressed, were often kept for several weeks, the ladies in question having great difficulty settling down for a night’s sleep. It was not unusual for ladies to have their hair dressed the day before a ball or court presentation and to sit and doze in a chair all night. Such hairstyles brought other unedifying costs. The London Magazine published a description in 1768 of the ‘opening of a lady’s head’ after nine horribly itchy weeks. The writer observed ‘false locks to supply the great deficiency of native hair, pomatum with profusion, greasy wool to bolster up the adopted locks, and grey powder to conceal at once age and dirt, and all these caulked together by pins of an indecent length and corresponding colour. When the comb was applied to the natural hair, I observed swarms o
f animalculas running about in the utmost consternation and in different directions.69

  Fleas, lice and nits feasting on rotting floury powder and pomatum (a concoction made from beef marrow), layers of decor weighing up to two pounds, and accumulations so precariously high that women had to stick their heads out of their carriage windows or kneel on the floor on the way to the ball – as usual the rich suffered heroically in order to display their worth. But alas they also, as pointed out in a letter to the London Magazine in 1768, smelled most unsavoury even if they did look enticing.

  Such ridiculous hairstyles could not last long. The French Revolution effectively axed them overnight and ladies of leisure quickly developed a more tasteful short and natural look. This did not stop the wittiest of their hairdressers from inventing new styles à la mode. They combed their clients’ hair up from the back, leaving the neck bare as if for the guillotine, and finished the arrangement off with a blood-red ribbon around the neck. But whimsical excess had had its day in England too. Powdered hair was quickly phased out when Pitt imposed a flour tax in 1795; and powdered wigs were abolished in the Army in 1799 when flour prices rocketed after a series of bad harvests.

  For two hundred years blonde hair had been out of fashion. It had become so cheap and had acquired so many smutty associations that it could no longer hold on to its dignity. No more the rarefied glory, honoured and worshipped by the great classical poets. No more the sublime lustre of the Renaissance artist’s dreams. No longer the sign of divine majesty. Blonde hair was now perceived as a warning – or convenient advertising – of a lady of cheap behaviour.d

  Poets and playwrights, ever ready to expose and immortalise a secretive sinful passion, began to reach back to earlier assocations of blonde hair with a dangerously powerful eroticism. John Milton, when writing Paradise Lost in the 1660s, followed medieval convention in depicting Eve with ‘wanton’, ‘dissheveled’ golden ringlets with which to clutch at Adam ‘as the vine curls her tendrils . . .’. Shakespeare had expressed the secretive fascination and fear of blonde hair in The Merchant of Venice, giving Portia hair that is ‘a golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men Faster than gnats in a cobweb’.

  By 1694, The Ladies Dictionary, published in London, was instructing ladies that hair of a yellow or shining golden colour has been ‘loaded with Obloquies, and is held as a sign of lustful constitution. For it is a Fancy generally received that the Locks can never sparkle with Golden Flames without, unless there lodges some cherished heat of that kind within.’ By the end of the century a popular ballad with a similar message was doing the rounds:

  The flaxen hath no good report,

  Tho many fancy the same;

  I know that most of that sort

  are notable Girls of the Game . . .

  For the next hundred years, as Pope, Coleridge and others wrote of the dangerous lure of blondeness, those unfortunates with natural blonde hair were still doing their best to conceal their predicament. A poem from 1772 made the point clear.e

  ‘Her lips were red, her looks were free,

  Her locks were yellow as gold:

  Her skin was as white as leprosy,

  The Nightmare Life-In-Death was she,

  Who thicks man’s blood with cold.’

  ‘Alas, I’m sorry for the fair, Who thus disgrace the nation.’ And in 1775 in The Lady’s Magazine, Dr John Cook offered a recipe for disguising blonde hair.70

  Time was when golden locks were looked upon as very beautiful, and even the lass of golden hair was, for that very reason, the more eligible, and preferred before those of the sex who bore any different colour; but now the case is changed . . . for the sake of those of the fair sex not so well satisfied with the present unfashionable colour of their hair, I freely proffer them the following short prescription, easily to be had, and as easily prepared whereby they may privately alter, whenever they please, the disagreeable yellow hue of their hair into an agreeable black, and that without either sin, danger, or shame.71

  Disagreeable yellow hair was already associated with shame, but it was soon to become equally associated with stupidity. In Paris in 1775, a beautiful courtesan named Mademoiselle Rosalie Duthé acquired the dubious honour of becoming the first officially recorded dumb blonde. She was a famously vacuous creature who had taken the polite conventions of feminine modesty to an extreme. She had developed a habit of long pregnant silences. Perhaps she had nothing to say, but her mystery and her secretive allure, combined with a number of other more tangible attributes, meant that she gathered appreciative customers from the highest social and political ranks. She had established herself as a rich courtesan living in considerable style by the time the programme of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés fair listed her as a robot. ‘Machine: A very beautiful and extremely curious contrivance representing a handsome woman. It performs all the actions of a living creature, eating, drinking, dancing and singing as if it were endowed with a mind. This mechanical woman can actually strip a foreigner to his shirt in a matter of seconds. Its only difficulty is with speech. Experts have already given up hope of curing this defect and admirers prefer to study the machine’s movements.’72

  Paris society, both high and low, who gathered for amusement at these boulevard fairs, began to giggle, and soon the playwright Landrin wove her character into a one-act play, Les Curiosités de la foire, which was performed in June 1775 at the Theatre de l’Ambigu. Like all of the most prominent courtesans of Paris, Mile Duthé arrived for the first night dressed in her greatest finery (she only ever wore pink), her blonde hair piled up high and laden with feathers and beads, her neck and ears dripping with her most glittering jewels. Having no idea what the play was about, she sat down with her lover, the Duke of Durfort, and was obliged to watch a representation of herself being lampooned on stage. Almost fainting from the embarrassment, she persuaded the duke to complain to the theatre manager, but he refused to take action. Her offer of a kiss for the first poet to redeem her reputation also went unanswered and the play kept Paris laughing for weeks.

  It is ironic that, while blonde hair was being pushed out of high-class fashion by French cultural preferences and by its associations with strumpets, it should have reasserted itself as the very image of purity and spiritual integrity in the new literary world of fairytales. It was easy to tell the difference between the strumpet and the fairytale heroine. Mile Duthé, arrogant, dyed blonde and vain, with strings of male admirers trailing after her aroma of knowing sexuality, was typical of a world far removed from the fairytale. You can instantly tell a classic fairytale heroine by her face and hair. She is young, pale and glowing, her milky northern European complexion tinged with rosy cheeks. Her blue eyes are wide and trusting, her nose delicate and her smile hopeful. Her abundant hair is naturally blonde, and in her manner you can often see an air of innocent virtue and charity, perhaps even a hint of the exploited skivvy waiting to be revealed in all her golden goodness.

  By the late seventeenth century, the fairytale heroine had begun to add her dose of magic to the story of the blonde. An elite literary clique in Paris was transforming fairytales from a nomadic oral tradition, which had bounced around the world for centuries, into a literary print culture. Eavesdropping somewhat awkwardly on the tales told in the kitchens of their own grand residences, Charles Perrault, Baroness d’Aulnoy and others sourced their material from the ancient folkloric traditions of the common people. They extracted tales from servants and from maids, and they got hold of tales overheard in the natural nesting places of storytellers – the spinning rooms, the sculleries and by the well-side. The wealth of stories they amassed was the stuff of an illiterate people’s culture, the resourceful entertainment of workers, often women, who were involved in the repetitive routine work of spinning, scrubbing, polishing and sewing. In between the revelations of gossip, dreams and news, these women spun stories loaded with all the universal motifs and lessons – of magic, fantasy, romance, generosity, and of greed, lust and cruelty.

  With
the exception of Snow White, who has always been distinguished by her black hair, the heroines of these fairytales were always blonde. These were not expensively dyed or manipulatively deceptive blondes. Such exotic creatures were unknown in the ordinary illiterate people’s culture. These beguiling fictional blondes were entirely natural. Blonde hair cascaded through their stories in lavish quantities, acting as a signal of youth, innocence, purity and cleanliness. Its fairness was accepted, entirely symbolically, both as a sign of quality and as the imagined opposite of foul.

  ‘La Belle aux cheveux d’or’, one of the most pointedly loaded of Mme d’Aulnoy’s stories, turns on the beauty, goodness and symbolic wealth of a princess’s golden hair. ‘Once upon a time there lived the daughter of a king, who was so beautiful that there was nothing quite so beautiful on earth; and because she was so beautiful, she was called Beauty with the Golden Hair, for her hair was finer than gold, and marvellously, wondrously blonde, all curly, and fell to her feet. She was always covered by her wavy hair, and clothes embroidered with diamonds and pearls, so that you could not look on her without loving her.’ The story has a simple plotline about a poor and generous hero who, after accomplishing three impossible tasks, wins the heart of his princess by his courage and constancy. Being blonde, the princess is of course overflowing with the milk of Christian charity. She is also beautiful and fantastically rich; and her hair provides the source of his initial enchantment and later his married bliss. It is hard to imagine, had the princess been lavishly mousy for example, that the story would have survived for quite so long.73