The Celts were a clean people, using soap long before the Romans. The Men and women of Britain sometimes wore swirling blue tattoos/painting on their bodies, and all Celts played lyres and harps, loving song, music, and recitation of legends and epic adventures, and used metal, or natural ornamentation, for horns of drinking.
Women were given many rites: daughters inherited possessions, children took their names, and abortion and choice of mate was a woman's right. Virginity wasn't valued, and twice a dowry was given for women who were previously married, or who had children. Both sexes loved jewelry: brooches decorated with gold filigree, cuttlefish shells, garnets, lapis and other stones, buckles of gold filigree and stones, pins linked with animal-style decorations, necklaces of amber and granulation and chip carvings. They also wore torques; pendants, bracelets, pins and necklaces, and the women sometimes sewed little bells on the fringed ends of their tunics. Above all, their elaborate intertwining artwork was a guard against the evil eye, or other curses.
Celtic women painted their fingernails, reddened their cheeks with roan, darkened their eyebrows with berry just, and wore their hair long and braided/piled up on the head. The usual dress for a woman was a sleeved tunic tucked into a large, gathered and belted skirt, or simply an ankle-length tunic with a belt. The men, on the continental mainland, wore trousers with a tunic. But in Britain and Ireland, the men wore a thigh-length tunic and a cloak, a dagger or sword (always present on them), and leather or fur footwear tied around their legs. Mustaches were very common, they wore their hair shoulder-length, and a horned helmet indicated a powerful warrior.
Their clothing was usually a wool, dyed in bright colors (such as red, green, blue or yellow), and some of the natural plant dyes they used were woad (for blue), acorns (shades of brown), Queen Anne's lace (yellow-green), and various parts of the alder produced many shades: the bard produced red, green came from the flowers, and brown from the twigs.
Both men and women wore huge, rectangular cloaks in early cultures, pinned at the right shoulder. The cloaks were usually woven in bright plaids, checks or stripes. Later they wore large, hooded capes that reached to their knees.
They were an energetic people, with a zest for life. They were psychics, in tune with Nature and the power of the human mind, and their ordinary objects were decorated with highly spiritual and symbolic designs, a reminder that their beliefs went well beyond "lip-service." What is now called magic was an integral part of their belief system, and the basics of that system are still as usable today as then.
