MISCELLANEOUS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 5612, 24 August 1889, Page 2 (Supplement)

MISCELLANEOUS.

FAIR, GOLDEN HAIR.

Golden hair seems to havo been tho delight of the old poets and painters. It has been utated that in tho London National Gallery, from tho idealistic brush of Correggio to tho prodigal brush of Rubens, there is not a single black-haired beauty. They all seized upon golden tresses with the same inborn instinct. Shakespeare had a decided preference for golden hair and makes frequent reference to it. Portia had ' sunny looks ' hanging ' on her temples like the golden fleece.' Julia, in the 'Two Gentlemen of Verona,' says of Sylvia and herself : ' Her hair is auburn, mine is perft-ct yellow.' He only mentions black hair twice throughout his entire plays. Hilton, in his ' Comus,', speaks of ' the loose train of amber dropping hair,' while Allan Cunningham must have had similar hair in his mind when he wrote : 'Her hair down-gushing in an armful flows, And floods her ivory neok, and glitters as sho goes.'

In those old days false hair was more fashionablo than it is now. Fair hair was especially tho rage and golden tints were so much prized that the price paid for it was nearly double its weight iv silver. When yellow hair was in fashion in London and Paris it was no uncommon thing to pay from $75 to $100 for a long plait of really gold hair. Actual white hair is very costly ; so is brown, if of a very fine texture. Horace Walpole mentions that the Countess of Suffolk sold her hair, which was ' fine, long and fair,' for £20. She had invited friends to dinner, aud being disappointed because a remittance did not come to hand, sold her hair to pay for the entertainment. The demand for false Lair at tho present day is vory gretit. We can got some idea of the magnitude of the traffic from the fact that the hair merchants of Loudon alone import live tons of hair annually and that the Parisian dealers harvest upward of _00,000 pounds of hair a year. It is mostly black hair and is collected in Brittany and the south of France. The market cannot be supplied simply by chance clippings ; there must be more ample sources and regular seasons for obtaining tho supply. There are itinerant d.alers who purchase hair, paying for each head of hair from one to five francs, according to its weight and beauty, the weight ranging from eleven to sixteen ounces. The peasant girls are quite willinjj to part -witt- their itiair, and will accept silks, laces, cheap jewellery, etc. with which the traffickers are well supplied. The latter attend tho fairs and merrymakings as tho best place to ply their vocation, and tho girls bring their hair to market just as they would peas, cabbages, etc.

Tho girls stand in a ring waiting to be shorn, with their caps in Uieir hands and their long hair combed out and hanging to their waists. Tho dealer, who is often a man, but sometimes a woman, ties up each crop of hair in a wisp by itself and losses it into a largo basket. The girls saorifico some of their vanity along with their hair, but it doos not worry them long. They want tho money, feel more comfortable, and the close-fitting caps they wear hido tho loss. Then, too, will not tho hair grow again?

Thu hair is dressed aud sorted in tho wholesale houses and sold to the hair workers at ten francs a pound. The retail dealer in turn obi. lins a g.iod profit, knowing that if one customer refuse »o pay it another will readily buy. Light hair is almost exclusively a Gorman product. The dealers claim to bo able to distinguish the nationality of hair, 'whether French or German, English or Irish, Scotch or Welsh. Nay, more, they assert that they can name the province in which the hair was gathered — even between two districts of Central France, though they may not be many miles apart. Tho difference is so very slight that the ordinary physiologist would not be abl:_ to detect any.