Sallow

For more than a century after the scandal of 1865, artists and historians wrestled with Olympia’s sallow skin, the bracelet on her right forearm, the orchid in her upswept red hair.

The girls are mostly Slavic-pretty, long-limbed with high cheekbones, sallow skin and green eyes. They are the closest thing to supermodels that Mulhuddart has ever seen.

A yellow undertone is often found on people with sallow skin – e.g. Asian.

She had such lovely sallow skin, the handsome high cheekbones of the north with the brown conker-colour eyes and the dark silken hair.

Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed.

She put her hand on the arm of her careworn, sallow father, and frothing her light draperies, proceeded over the eternal red carpet.

In a matter of hours she was looking gaunt, and sallow: her face had a kind of negative color.

The terrible descriptions were so real and vivid, that the sallow pages seemed to turn red with gore […]

On the opposite bank of the Allier the land kept mounting for miles to the horizon: a tanned and sallow autumn landscape […]

Scenes like this — the sallow evening light, the old Indian cropping grass, the creak of the cartwheels, the streaming egrets — were more native to him than England.

In a restaurant window little meringue cases, not quite sallow and not quite white.

Now a sallow night-light glowed from the table and heaped large shadows on the beds and up the walls.

Mr. President, the sallow air of our cities, the blackened sands of our seashores, our lakes and harbors reeking of sewage and depleted of oxygen are but a part of the sad legacy of the idea that nature can be treated as a servant, blindly obedient to every want, whim or pleasure of man.

The boat's deck was covered in moss, and its warm, sallow water was filled with lichens that gave off an eerie green glow.

My mouth went dry and a sallow feeling descended upon me.

The burden of a hollow and sallow feeling that was suffocating my soul as a learner had given way at this time to a joyous feeling of anticipation;

This ugliness, though, filled the air now. With something rank and squalid and seemingly spent with the character of death. No, it wasn't that I was scared, being all alone now out on my property. In my house. It was this surrounding sallow atmosphere now which depressed me. This deep sense of some deep basic wrong occupying my surrounding world.

The tan of his sunburnt face and hands contrasted sadly with the sallowing skin of the girl-wife, who, despite his care, was sinking under her task of son-bearing.

I might have stemmed them in a narrow vase And watched each petal sallowing . . .

His complexion had darkened, sallowed; his black moustache had lost boldness, become sardonic; there were lines which she did not know about his face.

My maiden reviews, once the verbal equivalent of murder, are now a brief, compact pile, almost as old as I. They fall apart sallowing, their stiff pages chip like dry leaves flying the tree that fed them.

1835, Fanny Kemble (as Frances Anne Butler), Journal, London: John Murray, Volume 1, entry for 15 September, 1832, p. 105, footnote, The climate of this country is the scape-goat upon which all ill looks and ill health of the ladies is laid; but while they are brought up as effeminately as they are, take as little exercise, live in rooms like ovens during the winter, and marry as early as they do, it will appear evident that many causes combine with an extremely variable climate, to sallow their complexions, and destroy their constitutions.

But would a pretender carry his or her cunning to the extreme of fortifying the manuscript in every possible way against the sallowing touch of time[…]?

Mary Gowd, with her frumpy English hat and her dreadful English fringe, and her brick-red English cheeks, which not even the enervating Italian sun, the years of bad Italian food or the damp and dim little Roman room had been able to sallow.

All she knew was that she had been stiffened and thickened by the same years that had given the other woman added grace and suppleness, that her skin had been dried and sallowed by the same lights and weathers that had added luster to the radiant beauty of the other […]

c. 1553, Humphrey Llwyd (translator), The Treasury of Healthe, London: William Coplande, Remedies, Chapter 44, I[f] a man eate the flowers of a sallow or wyllowe tree, or of a Poplet tree, they wyl make cold al the heate of carnall lust in hym.

And fast beside a little brooke did pas Of muddie water, that like puddle stanke, By which few crooked sallowes grew in ranke:

[…] it came into my Mind, That the Twigs of that Tree from whence I cut my Stakes that grew, might possibly be as tough as the Sallows, and Willows, and Osiers in England […]

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn / Among the river sallows, borne aloft / Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; [...]

Now, everything irritated him: the two sallows, one all gold and perfume and murmur, one silver-green and bristly, reminded him, that here he had taught her about pollination.

Who-so that buildeth his hous al of salwes, And priketh his blinde hors over the falwes, And suffreth his wyf to go seken halwes, Is worthy to been hanged on the galwes!

1564, William Bullein, A Dialogue Bothe Pleasaunte and Pietifull Wherein Is a Goodly Regimente against the Feuer Pestilence with a Consolacion and Comfort against Death, London: John Kingston, [p. 22b], […] set Sallowes about the bedde, besprinkled with vineger and rose water.

1767, Francis Fawkes (translator), The Idylliums of Theocritus, London, for the author, Idyllium 16, p. 156, For lo! their spears the Syracusians wield, And bend the pliant sallow to a shield:

He stuck a number of sallows in a circle, at equal distances, in the grass; the circle was the size which he wished the basket to be. He then began to weave other sallows between these, in a manner which Frank easily learned to imitate […]

The sallow knows the basketmaker’s thumb; The oar, the guide’s.