Among the Druze of Mount Lebanon the initiated dressed in two colours and no more. A woman wore a black jumper and skirt under a white veil; a man shaved his head and wound a white laffa around the tarbush. Colour belonged to the uninitiated.

The costume is therefore a dense matte black field carrying a single bleached-white mark. Through the nineteenth century that veil hung from the tantour — a silver, copper or gold cone up to seventy-five centimetres tall, worn by married women, effectively abandoned after the 1840s.