Unmarried girls are called "yellow flower girls". Why exactly?

Now that the Spring Festival is here, if any family has a daughter who is not married, the neighbors next door will complain. Oh, whose daughter is not married yet, when will she get married? When will you bring your boyfriend back? Such a joke. Many people do not call their daughters girls. This is a custom whether in ancient times or in modern times. So many people don't understand why they turned into girls? Where does the word yellow flower come from? In ancient times, the so-called yellow flower refers to a kind of decoration on the forehead of ancient women, also called yellow flower. Women at that time liked to use yellow powder to draw flowers and birds on their foreheads in various shapes. Or use gold characters, and then change them into the shape of flowers and birds, and stick them on the forehead. This custom originated in the Northern and Southern Dynasties and became popular in the Sui and Tang Dynasties.

From ancient times to the present, we can see that no matter what era or what kind of customs. Women love beauty, this is something that cannot be changed. Today’s women like to be beautiful, like to put on makeup, and like to use all kinds of cosmetics. In ancient times, although there were no such complicated cosmetics, many girls also liked to draw some flower and bird shapes on their faces, or fold some flower and bird shapes out of paper and stick them on their foreheads. So the fact that women love beauty is really eternal. Let’s get back to the topic. There is actually a custom and a beautiful legend behind the name Huanghua Girl. During the Liu Song Dynasty during the Southern and Northern Dynasties, Princess Shouyang, the daughter of Emperor Wu of the Song Dynasty, once slept under the eaves of the Han Zhang Palace, and a plum blossom fell on her forehead. The pollen from the plum blossoms touched her face and formed the shape of a flower on her forehead.

I didn’t erase it at the time. Later, Princess Shouyang thought it looked good and developed a habit of often placing plum blossoms in front of her forehead. So it looked very beautiful. Many people in the palace saw how beautiful Princess Shouyang was and followed suit. Later, plum blossom makeup came into being, or plum blossom makeup for short. This kind of decoration gradually spread outside the palace, and folk girls also imitated it by cutting flowers out of chrysanthemums or yellow paper and pasting them on their foreheads. Gradually, it developed into the custom of pasting yellow flowers, and gradually, the name of a girl with yellow flowers spread. In ancient times, unmarried girls were called yellow-flowered girls, and they were also called wait-and-see girls. Anyone who has watched TV dramas knows that when some gentlemen introduce their daughters, they will say: The little girl is waiting to be married.

In fact, this matter is related to the custom of naming in ancient times. Modern people generally choose names, but in ancient times, they paid more attention to names. Three months after birth, some fathers would name their children as babies. name. When you become an adult, you need to have a suitable name in addition to your name, which is the name we all have now, which is also a form of title. In ancient times, when a man was 20 years old, he had to hold a ceremony, be crowned, and take a character as an alias. When a girl turns 15, there is also a ceremony and a word used as a nickname. Then it means that the girl has reached adulthood, that is, she has reached the age of marriage. Therefore, in a specific language environment, women hold ceremonies and take this word, which means getting married, so it is also called waiting to be married.