The medieval complexion: when skin tone and temperament shared a single name

There is a French word that changed meaning, and in changing meaning, it let an idea slip away.

The word is complexion. Today, in several languages, it refers to skin tone — the colour and quality of the skin. Once it meant both at the same time: skin tone and temperament, inseparably.

What the word used to mean

A complexion, in medieval thought, was a person’s own proportion — the singular balance that explained both how they looked and how they behaved.

Skin tone was therefore not a surface fact. It was the visible rising of an inner workings, which is why a single word named both.

Hildegard of Bingen

Among the authors who worked with this notion, one figure holds a particular place: Hildegard of Bingen, a Rhineland abbess of the 12th century, whose Causae et curae has come down to us and been edited and translated several times.

What strikes in this text is not the theory — it is that of her time — but the precision of its application. She describes what one should eat according to one’s complexion, which plants suit whom, how to adapt rest, bathing, exercise, the rhythm of the seasons.

It is a manual for living adjusted to persons, written eight hundred years before anyone spoke of personalisation.

What these texts did that we no longer do

They sorted remedies by recipient.

That is the point worth keeping. A medieval recipe does not only say what it does: it says which complexion it suits, and therefore which others it does not suit.

This made it possible to say no — the sentence no modern shelf ever utters. A shelf proposes, adds, widens, and leaves the customer to make a choice they have no means to make.

What to think of it, honestly

The physiology of these texts is false. The humours do not exist, and nothing they assert about causes holds.

It would be dishonest to cite Hildegard as an authority. She is a source of history, not a source of truth.

What remains, however, is methodological, and that has not been refuted: the idea that advice must be addressed, and that skin tone is a rising to the surface rather than an independent object.

What the word took with it

In shrinking to skin tone, “complexion” took with it the idea that the face expresses an inner workings.

It is that idea, and not the humours, that is missing from our current vocabulary. Skin type describes a surface state; it points to no logic beneath, which is why it changes three times in a life without anything fundamental having changed.

A reading that begins from a fixed given restores to the face what the old word granted it: the status of a sign rather than an object.