Flaxen hair is a light yellow, like the pale fibre of the flax plant — the plant we make linen from. It is not a bright gold, and it is not red. Think of dry, pale yellow, almost straw, but softer. In stories, a flaxen-haired child is fair in that old picture-book way. The word is rather literary now. Everyday talk says blonde or fair. You almost never use flaxen for anything except hair, unless someone is writing in an old style. It is flax plus -en, an old ending that meant “made of.” Flaxen cloth was cloth made of flax. Then the colour of that fibre moved onto hair. So the hair word is a colour borrowed from a cloth word, which was borrowed from a plant. That is why it feels old: it has walked a long way to get to the sentence you are reading.

亞麻色的（淺黃頭髮）