I've recently been reading a book titled The King's Pearl by Melita Thomas. It's about Mary I, Queen of England, aka Bloody Mary. In the book there's the following picture, showing a young Mary looking very red-haired and blue-eyed.
We've seen this image before, but it's nice to see a glossy print in a book.
The red hair is interesting given that her mother was the Spanish Katherine of Aragon. Though she too was said to have been redheaded. Perhaps not altogether surprising given she was of English descent on the maternal side - a great, great grand daughter of John of Gaunt (I'm not sure I have the right amount of greats in there - it's a bit complicated). Still, the ponderance of red hair in all these royal lines is a tad strange. As we've noted many times before.
Henna and Ochre
As we're on the topic of hair I might as well touch on something related. In recent posts Emanuela has been investigating if the hair of Egyptian mummies was dyed. As she's doing all the hard work I can do a bit of lazy speculation. It all got me thinking about the commonness of red dye throughout human history. Not only do we have henna which is commonly used, but we also have red ochre, which humans have said to have been using for hundreds of thousands of years. Even today some African tribes use it on their hair and skin.
It's odd that dying the hair red was so ubiquitous, whilst, at the same time, actual red hair has been unpopular. According to science, red hair first appeared in humans 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. So seemingly people were using red ochre before red hair appeared. You could speculate that perhaps red hair evolved as people were selecting for something already popular due to the common use of red ochre. And that now such dyes are out of fashion, red hair, like an old pair of flares, has become dated and unpopular too.
That would be a touch silly, but nevertheless, the common use of red pigments is something to wonder at.
No comments:
Post a Comment