Celtic clothes and appearance

We are informed from sources of Roman history that the Celts were like no other men. They were exceedingly tall and had very muscular white skinned bodies, even their hair was blonde although it is believed that this was achieved artificially by the use of lime.

 Whilst some of the Celts appeared clean shaven, others had shaven cheeks but grew facial hair around their mouth and chin to acts a filter for the kinds of food which they ate.

The Celts, before the Romans started to use soap, because were a very clean people. The Celtic men and women wore swirling blue tattoos or paintings on their bodies in order to look more fiercely. They played lyres and harps, loved song, music, and recitation of legends and epic adventures. They used metal or ornamented natural horns for drinking.

Both sexes loved jewelry: bgold decorated brooches, , garnets, lapis, and other stones; pins and linked pins with animal-style decoration; necklaces of amber, granulation and carving. They wore torques, pendants, bracelets, pins and necklaces. The women sometimes sewed little bells on the fringed ends of their tunics. The elaborate intertwinings of their artwork was a guard against the evil eye or curses.

Celtic women painted their fingernails, reddened their cheeks, darkened their eyebrows. They wore their hair long and made braids or piled up on the head. Their usual dress was a sleeved tunic tucked into a large, gathered, belted skirt or simly an ankle-length tunic with a belt.

Celtic man wore trousers with a tunic or a thigh-high tunic and a cloak, the ever-present dagger or sword, and leather or fur footgear tied around the legs. Mustaches were common, and the hair shoulder length. A horned helmet indicated a powerful warrior.

In the early cultures, both men and women had huge rectangular cloaks pinned at the right shoulder. These cloaks were generally woven in bright plaids, checks or stripes. Later, they wore large hooded capes reaching to the knees.

Julius Ceasar wrote about them:

"Most of the inland inhabitants [of Britain] do not sow corn, but live on milk and flesh, and are clad with skins. All the Britons indeed, dye themselves with woad, which occasions a bluish colour, and thereby have a more terrible appearance in fight. They wear their hair long, and have every part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip. "

And this is a quote of the Roman historian, Diodorus Siculus:

"They are very tall in stature, with rippling muscles under clear white skin. Their hair is blond, but not naturally so: they bleach it, to this day, artificially, washing it in lime and combing it back from their foreheads. They look like wood-demons, their hair thick and shaggy like a horse's mane. Some of them are clean-shaven, but others - especially those of high rank - shave their cheeks but leave a moustache that covers the whole mouth"