Telltale Signs


     I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and John F. Kennedy's Ambassador to India, who said "the more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women".  I have my own way of assessing the material prosperity of a European country, based on observations traveling across Europe from Portugal to Russia over forty-five years.  Mine involves women, but my observation point is considerably to the north of Galbraith's.

     My thesis is that you can look at the quality of the hair dye used by women (or the lack of it), and surmise something about the country's economy.  Certainly at the topmost tiers there's no doubt, every woman of European extraction is a blonde of some sort.  I attended the lunch for the wives of United Nations ambassadors during the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the U.N.'s founding in 1995, and found this true without a doubt.  Queen Noor of Jordan, the former Lisa Halaby, was the most beautiful woman in the room, and subtly blonde.  However, the wife of the Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations wore her hair blonde too, albeit streaked in a shade that flattered her darker skin.  At Texas barbecues I have attended, all the women are blonde, regardless of origin, so this seems to prove my proposition that being blonde is a sign of affluence, or its appearance.  After all, to maintain an elaborately orchestrated balayage, highlights so subtly painted on hair strands as to mimic the natural range of colors children's hair has, is the labor-intensive task of a skilled colorist, and doesn't come cheap.

     The reverse is also true.  The worse the means by which hair is colored, the less the extra money to spend on discretionary items.  In Nessebur, Bulgaria, a town known for an unfinished Orthodox church of some artistic worth (whose construction ended, as was traditional, when a worker was killed during the building), cruise ship tourists (including me) were set-upon by several stubby, short-haired women selling trinkets.  I don't remember the items, but I do remember the women's hair, a vermillion no human hair follicle anywhere ever knew unassisted.

     This proposition could also be tested on crossing the Pyrenees from France to Spain in the early 1990s, before Spain boomed economically later in the decade.  (--Only to bust now: but more on that when I am in-country in a few weeks.)  It was obvious that the Spanish standard of living was not comparable to that of their neighbors across the border.  Towns like Saint Jean-de-Luz were bastions of bourgeois comfort, with le Creuset pots and other kitchen wares on offer in local shops, along with Soleiado aprons and headscarves.  The French women were slender and carefully coiffed, if a bit crabby, as everyone was in France that year, 1992.  --The economy was doing poorly, and it was only with victory in the World Cup that France lost its down-in-the-mouth attitude, le grogne, a simmering discontent.

     That year, after you crossed the border from Hendaye to Irun, then took the Euzkadi train to San Sebastian, you walked into another world.  Older women wore a lot of mourning black, and very few women had their hair colored.  Spanish women still favored those eyeglasses with "eyebrows" so favored by Jean-Paul Sartre, which made them look even more serious, even more sombre.

     How times change!  By 1998, the boom was on west of the Pyrenees.  The economic gap between Spain and France had narrowed.  Spanish grandmothers now wore fine navy blue wools, as Frenchwomen did, and their new-found wealth was on view on their heads.  I remember being rather shocked to see a distinguished woman, surely in her seventies, wearing a rather standard-issue flipped coiffure in three tints: pale peach, pale pink, and a hint of mauve.  Her head was a virtual assorted sherbet bowl of hair.  I wondered how much all that effort cost, and whether the economy had not expanded too quickly.