Dark woollen cloth is the standard material of dress, formed into a wide frock, trousers, and leggings, the last replaced in the wealthy by boots of Russia, or other costly leather. Over all is worn a capacious mantle of cloth, sometimes lined with fur. From a red girdle depend various purses, containing the wooden teacup inseparable from a Tibetan, flint and steel, and other odds and ends. Gay broad-brimmed hats are in vogue at Lhassa, but are rarer in the west. The women dress much like the men, and plait the hair in narrow tresses hanging on the shoulders. On the top of the head the Ladakh women wear a flat lappet of cloth or leather, descending in a peak behind, stuck over with beads of turquoise, amber, and cornelian; and the back hair is gathered in a queue, which is lengthened by tassels of coloured worsted intermixed with shells, bells, and coins, until it nearly touches the ground. Though not veiled, like the Moslem women, with muslin or calico, their charms are subjected to a much more efficacious disguise. Before leaving home, every respectable woman at Lhassa plasters her face with a black sticky varnish like raspberry jam, which gives her an aspect scarcely human. The practice is said at Lhassa to have been introduced some centuries ago, in order to check the immorality which was then rampant in the city. But it appears to be widely diffused, and is probably ancient. Rubruquis refers to something like it in the thirteenth century. Grueber and Dorville, who travelled through Tibet and Nepaul in 1661, say, "The women of these kingdoms are so hideous that they are liker demons than human creatures; for through some superstition, instead of water they always use a stinking oil to wash with; and with this they are so fetid and so bedaubed that they might be taken for hateful hobgoblins." But tastes differ, and the same unguent which the missionaries represent as intended to render the women hideously unattractive, or at least a modification of it in fashion at Ladakh, Moorcroft appears to think is adopted as a cosmetic. From all the fathers could learn, the black varnish has not altogether reformed Tibetan morals. The strange, repulsive custom of _polyandry_, or the marriage of one woman to several brothers, is diffused over the greater part of Tibet, though it is not mentioned by Huc as existing at Lhassa. It is not confined to the lower ranks, but is frequent also in opulent families. Turner mentions one instance in the neighbourhood of Teshoo Loombo, where _five_ brothers were living together very happily under the same connubial compact.