FAIRY-TALE HAIR

How lockdown has taken Meg Honigmann one step closer in her quest for glossy tresses worthy of a storybook heroine

When I read Tennyson’s poetry as a teenager, I could never understand why so many of his female protagonists insisted on staying inside and bemoaning their existence. ‘No time hath she to sport and play,’ he writes of the Lady of Shalott, who watches the world go by through her enchanted mirror. How awful, I thought. And then our own world went into lockdown and I reconsidered the lessons to be learnt from the cloistered heroines of literature and legend.

Think of Rapunzel shuttered up in a turret, her mood glum but her beautiful hair ‘fine as spun gold’. The idea of glossy waves long and strong enough to haul a prince up to the top of a tower remains a fantasy, but all that time indoors clearly worked wonders for her tresses. There is hair inspiration aplenty in art, too, most strikingly in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting Lady Lilith pictures Adam’s first wife brushing out endless lustrous red locks, while in William Holman Hunt’s The Lady of Shalott, the subject’s long hair blows up around her almost supernaturally, stretching to the edges of the canvas.