About Cinderella's glass slippers, I recently read a piece that explained her slippers may not have been made of glass, after all. You have no idea how relieved it made me feel to know she didn't have to walk in such impractical shoes, even in a fairy tale. Apparently, the shoes were made of white squirrel fur, a practical material, according to Google, used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as a trimming or lining for garments.
In 1697, Charles Perrault, a French author, rewrote the tale of Cinderella, or Cendrillon, and replaced the word vair, which Merriam-Webster defines as "the bluish-gray and white fur of a squirrel prized for ornamental use in medieval times," with verre, which, in French, means glass.
