Throughout the world and different time periods, beauty standards have changed and developed drastically.
The Huns terrorized much of Europe and the Roman Empire during the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.
The Huns also held strong and unusual beauty standards. The Huns faces were unaturally changed to appear a certain way and confine to their strongly rooted culture as we later discuss.
The Huns Face & Facial Hair
The Huns fought the Roman Empire for power and land.
The Western Roman Empire would gather information about their enemies. This is how we have come to find out what kind of people the Huns were and what they looked like.
One prominant feature the Huns faces had was their lack of facial hair.
The Roman Empire and many other cultures at the time considered facial hair to be a sign of beauty and masculinity.
On the other hand, the Huns considered facial hair to be a feature of disgust to the point at which they would remove it permanently.
The skin on the Huns cheeks would be burned. In doing so, the deepest layers of the skin and rebirth process of the hair is destroyed.
This was an effective way to remove one’s facial hair permanently.
An alternative method they would use was to slash their cheeks to stop the process of hair growth.
As a consequence, the burns left many scars on the Huns face and the skin will become permanently damaged.
Boys from a younger age would start the hair removal process to eleminate any hair grown from the beginning.
Archeological Findings
Another interesting beauty tradition the Huns had was to wrap their babies in a way which allows the skull to grow in a different form.
This is possible with babies because their skulls were not fully developed and hardened. This allowed the shape to be changed whilst they are still developing.
The cloth was pressed so hard that their skulls had a longer form.
This part is confirmed by archeology findings and the interesting part is that many of their Germanic allies seemed to also to follow this practice.
Skulls would be found in that exact shape, confirming the tradition.
For further information on historic beauty standards, please refer to “History of Beauty” by Umberto Eco. It also covers the Hunnic culture and their beliefs.