My husband was very against the idea. He thought it was too much of a gimmick. And it emphasized your hair and cheekbones and it made you look very beautiful. They powdered their faces white, and against that pale face teeth would look yellow. They also shaved their eyebrows and painted large round ones halfway up their foreheads, which also changes the proportion of the face.
Every culture does something for the sake of beauty that other cultures think is very strange.
Historically, Murasaki lived 500 years before the first geisha, so they don't have anything to do with each other. I think that Murasaki herself would have been a terrible geisha, just in terms of her personality. She was so introspective, a very interior kind of person, whereas a geisha has to be very gregarious and outgoing. Laura Miller is Salon's New York editorial director.