A Simple Coiffure: Basic Hairstyles for Victorian Women of Moderate Means
(An Embroidery Lesson by Gustave Leonard de Jonghe, 1864.)
For balls and other formal events, fashionable women of the early 1860s often arranged their hair in elaborate styles with artificial tufts, pads, and false plaits. On a day-to-day basis, however, Victorian women of more moderate means stuck to more practical styles. These styles included firmly pinned plaits, simple chignons, and rolls bound up in a hair net or secured with a ribbon. In today’s post, we take a brief look at some of these styles, specifically those which feature in my new Victorian romance novel The Lost Letter.[…]Continue Reading
A Passion for Auburn Hair: Victorian Views On Reddish-Brown Tresses
“Her friends call her hair auburn, but her enemies call it red.”
Sylvia’s Book of the Toilet, 1881.
Auburn hair has long been admired for its beauty. In the sixteenth century, Titian famously painted beautiful women with hair of a reddish hue. While in his epic Regency era poem Don Juan, Lord Byron waxed rhapsodic about dancing girls, each having:[…]Continue Reading
The Scent of Violets: Perfume, Cosmetics, and Crime in the Late Victorian Era
“The fondness for violets increases with time, and many women of fashion will tolerate no other fragrance.”
American Soap Journal and Manufacturing Chemist, 1895.
In 1893, a woman by the name of Margaret Gainer was arrested, charged, and ultimately sentenced to thirty days imprisonment for stealing a bottle of violet perfume from a hairdresser’s shop. The hairdresser had seen her take the bottle and slip it into her pocket, but when he gave her the choice of putting the bottle back or facing the consequences, Miss Gainer steadfastly refused to relinquish the violet perfume. Her motivation for the theft—and her subsequent unwillingness to part with her ill-gotten gains—is not entirely clear; however, I suspect it had more than a little to do with the late Victorian violet fad.[…]Continue Reading
A Fashionable Coiffure: Rolls, Plaits, and other Popular Hairstyles of 1863
“The MANNER of DRESSING the HAIR calls for much attention at the present day, and many are the inquiries addressed to us on this important subject.”
Peterson’s Magazine, 1863.
Hairstyles of the 1860s are, in my opinion, some of the most beautiful of the nineteenth century. Hair was arranged in enormous rolls or plaited into intricately woven patterns. Women donned crowns of flowers or bound their hair up into silken nets or velvet hoods. These were soft, feminine styles, lacking the Gothic severity of the 1830s and 1840s while, at the same time, still far more conservative than the long, draped curls that would come into fashion in the 1870s and 1880s. These were also the hairstyles that most of us recognize from the American Civil War era (1861-1865). Popular coiffures changed from year to year, and often from month to month. Today, we look at a few of the most fashionable styles of 1863.[…]Continue Reading
Victorian Fat Shaming: Harsh Words on Weight from the 19th Century
“All defects are in the nature of ugliness, but certain ones are more degrading than others; and of these obesity, which is a deformity, is signally ignoble.”
The Woman Beautiful, 1899.
During the early and mid-Victorian era, a great many health and beauty books echoed the popular 19th century sentiment that plumpness equaled good health. It was leanness, not heaviness, to which beauty experts directed the majority of their criticism. For example, in his 1870 book Personal Beauty: How to Cultivate and Preserve it in Accordance with the Laws of Health, author Daniel Brinton states that a “scrawny bony figure” is “intolerable to gods and men.” According to Brinton, the only occasion on which excessive leanness had ever been beneficial to a lady was in an encounter with a cannibal. As he explains:
“The only lady who we ever heard derived advantage from such an appearance was Madame Ida Pfeiffer. She relates that somewhere in her African travels the natives had a mind to kill and eat her, but she looked so unpalatably lean and tough that the temptation was not strong enough, and thus her life was saved.”