Coloration is only one of the elements of beauty,
though an important one. Other things being equal, the most blonde is most
beautiful; but it so happens that among the races of Great Britain the
other things are very frequently not equal, and that, notwithstanding a
conviction ingrained in the language, with us the fairest of women is not
always the "fairest." So magical, however, is the effect of brilliant
coloring that it serves to keep alive in popular opinion an unqualified
belief in the universal European creed of the beauty of blondness.
We have seen that underlying the conception of beauty, more especially as
it manifests itself in woman to man, are to be found at least three
fundamental elements: First there is the general beauty of the species as
it tends to culminate in the white peoples of European origin; then there
is the beauty due to the full development or even exaggeration of the
sexual and more especially the secondary sexual characters; and last there
is the beauty due to the complete embodiment of the particular racial or
national type. To make the analysis fairly complete must be added at least
one other factor: the influence of individual taste.
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