It was a military style called a queue, "the 18th-century equivalent of a marine buzz cut," Krulwich writes. The style he favored wasn’t fancy, though it may appear so to modern eyes. But a project out of the University of Virginia called The Papers of George Washington also confirms that the first president’s natural hair color was light brown. McRae, was painted in 1860, long after Washington’s death in 1799. The painting, The Courtship of Washington by John C. There’s a painting of him as a young man, with Martha and her two children, that shows his hair as reddish brown, which Chernow says was his true color. What’s more (though you probably already guessed this), he wasn’t white-haired. All of it-the pigtail, the poofy part in the back, that roll of perfect curls near his neck. At National Geographic, Robert Krulwich writes that he was stunned to learn this fact from Ron Chernow’s book Washington: A Life. It was pulled back from his forehead and puffy on the sides, colored grey-white perhaps like many wigs of the day. George Washington’s hairstyle is iconic and simple enough that most Americans can probably recall it in an instant - or they can at least refresh their memory by pulling out a dollar bill or a quarter.
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