While Houdoy may have been correct, it still seems probable that the eye described as vair was usually assumed to be “various” in color also, of the kind we commonly call gray, which is usually applied to blue eyes encircled with a ring of faintly sprinkled brown pigment.  Such eyes are fairly typical of northern France and frequently beautiful.  That this was the case seems to be clearly indicated by the fact that, as Houdoy himself points out, a few centuries later the vair eye was regarded as vert, and green eyes were celebrated as the most beautiful.[161] The etymology was false, but a false etymology will hardly suffice to change an ideal.  At the Renaissance Jehan Lemaire, when describing Venus as the type of beauty, speaks of her green eyes, and Ronsard, a little later, sang: 

    “Noir je veux l’oeil et brun le teint,
    Bien que l’oeil verd toute la France adore.”

Early in the sixteenth century Brantome quotes some lines current in France, Spain, and Italy according to which a woman should have a white skin, but black eyes and eyebrows, and adds that personally he agrees with the Spaniard that “a brunette is sometimes equal to a blonde,"[162] but there is also a marked admiration for green eyes in Spanish literature; not only in the typical description of a Spanish beauty in the Celestina (Act.  I) are the eyes green, but Cervantes, for example, when referring to the beautiful eyes of a woman, frequently speaks of them as green.

It would thus appear that in Continental Europe generally, from south to north, there is a fair uniformity of opinion as regards the pigmentary type of feminine beauty.  Such variation as exists seemingly involves a somewhat greater degree of darkness for the southern beauty in harmony with the greater racial darkness of the southerner, but the variations fluctuate within a narrow range; the extremely dark type is always excluded, and so it would seem probable is the extremely fair type, for blue eyes have not, on the whole, been considered to form part of the admired type.

If we turn to England no serious modification of this conclusion is called for.  Beauty is still fair.  Indeed, the very word “fair” in England itself means beautiful.  That in the seventeenth century it was generally held essential that beauty should be blonde is indicated by a passage in the Anatomy of Melancholy, where Burton argues that “golden hair was ever in great account,” and quotes many examples from classic and more modern literature.[163] That this remains the case is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that the ballet and chorus on the English stage wear yellow wigs, and the heroine of the stage is blonde, while the female villain of melodrama is a brunette.