Also called glamour magic, glamoury, casting the glamour
A glamour is magic that changes how something looks to the eye. In Scottish lore it was a fairy or witch's illusion; today it usually means dressing, grooming or making up with intent so you carry yourself the way you want to be seen.
TraditionScottish fairy lore, modern witchcraft
RegionScotland, then the English-speaking world
Era18th century word; modern practice 20th century to present
Moon☽ Waxing moon
DayFriday · Venus
ElementAir
Difficulty●○○ Simple
Time20 minutes, as part of getting ready
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
The working
Decide on one quality you want people to notice today, such as warmth, confidence or calm. Choose a quality, not a person to impress.
Wash your face or hands and mist with rose water if using it, saying the quality aloud once.
Do your usual grooming slowly. With each step, picture that quality settling on you like light catching the surface.
Hold the anchor piece in your palm, breathe on it, and say 'As I wear this, I am seen as I mean to be.' Put it on.
Look in the mirror and name the quality one last time, then stop checking. Constant checking breaks the spell.
Wear the anchor all day. At night take it off with a word of thanks, which ends the glamour.
Take care: Use only cosmetics and mists you already know your skin tolerates. A glamour shapes how you carry yourself; it should never be used to deceive someone about who you are.
Versions across time and place
i
Fairy glamour and the ointment that breaks it
British and Irish fairy legend · medieval to 19th century
In many tales a human midwife is fetched to a fairy birth and accidentally rubs fairy ointment on one eye. That eye sees through the glamour: the palace is a cave, the fine clothes are rags. When the fairies learn of it, they blind the eye. Here glamour is something done to you, not by you.
Uses: ointment
Recorded in: Fairy ointment tale type (Migratory Legend 5070), Wikipedia 'Fairy ointment'
ii
Scott's 'gramarye'
Scottish literary romanticism · 1805
Scott used the old word gramarye for dark learned magic and in his notes and later writing helped carry 'glamour', a magical illusion over the eyes, into general English. It is literature rather than a recorded rite, but it fixed the idea of a glamour as a spell on the sight.
Recorded in: Walter Scott, 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel' (1805)
iii
Hollywood and modern makeup glamour
20th-century popular culture and online witchcraft · 1930s to present
By the 1930s 'glamour' meant alluring beauty in film and magazines. Contemporary witches took the word back toward magic and treat a lipstick, a scent or a styled look as a small enchantment, often charged with a sigil drawn in skincare or a quiet word at the mirror.
Uses: lipstick, perfume, mirror
Recorded in: Online Etymology Dictionary, 'glamour'
History
Glamour began as a Scots word. Etymologists trace it to 'gramarye', from 'grammar', which in medieval usage meant book-learning and then, by the late 1400s, occult learning or magic. The Scots form 'glamer' appears in the early 1700s with the sense of an enchantment over the eyes, so that a person or place seems other than it is. Why 'gr' became 'gl' has never been settled; the Oxford etymologist Anatoly Liberman calls the shift unexplained.
Sir Walter Scott (1771 to 1832) made the word famous. His 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' (1805) revived gramarye for wizard's magic, and his popular writing spread glamour beyond Scotland. In folk belief it was usually something fairies or witches cast on others, as the fairy-ointment legends show. The idea of a self-chosen glamour worn like a garment is modern, coming through 20th-century film language and today's witchcraft.
