The common things in use, eating and drinking implements, the bags they carry, the bed-clothing, the chess-men, the tables, are embroidered or chased or set with red carbuncles or white stones or with interlacing of gold.

Colour is everywhere and everywhere loved.

And where colour is loved the arts flourish, as the decorative arts flourished in Ireland.
Lastly, on this matter, the Irish tale-tellers, even to the present day, dwell with persistence on the colour of the human body as a special loveliness, and with as much love of it as any Venetian when he painted it.

And they did this with a comparison of its colour to the colours they observed in Nature, so that the colour of one was harmonised with the colour of the other.

I might quote many such descriptions of the appearance of the warriors--they are multitudinous--but the picture of Etain is enough to illustrate what I say--"Her hair before she loosed it was done in two long tresses, yellow like the flower of the waterflag in summer or like red gold.
Her hands were white as the snow of a single night, and her eyes as blue as the dark hyacinth, and her lips red as the berries of the rowan-tree, and her body as white as the foam of the sea-waves.