This is almost certainly completely wrong, the smurfs get their hat designs from the type of hats that gnomes and dwarves and goblins usually wear in germanic folklore, the most well known of all being the garden dwarves, whose design also inspired the dwarves in snow white. The design of garden dwarves is quite recent and apparently come from miners. The hats were filled with straw to protect the miner's head from the ceiling.
But the article does cover that. German gnomes (Kobolde, especially Hödekin) are usually depicted with pointy hats, or at least ones that curl backwards. The smurf hats are clearly wearing Phrygian caps.
A quick Google image search for "garden gnome" and "gartenzwerg" shows that both types are quite common. But they originally didn't necessarily have the hats common today. These are the oldest surviving garden gnomes according to [1]:
That’s still arguably a classic Phrygian cap design. Whatever or not that was the intention/inspiration, it does resemble them - the hats you just showed are not perfectly conical, there’s a flip at the top.
The article does state that the Smurfs and the French got the wrong hat and that it's supposed to be a conical pileus rather than the crooked phrygian.
"In Rome, a freed slave had his head shaved. Then, they would wear a pileus, in part to keep their head warm. The hat was a sign of the slave’s freedom/liberty.
Somewhere along the line in the French Revolution, they adopted the freed slaves’ head gear as their own symbol of freedom, but picked the wrong one."
Fun fact: You can see a pileus on the Ides of March coin reverse from 43 BC, minted by Brutus to commemorate the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC.
I guess because it is full of guesswork and devoid of real factual research (at least for the main headline question). But it turns out that bloggers looking for content and lacking any skill are also capable of writing plausible-sounding slop.
Fun random fact, the tool used to animate the smurfs hats in 3 out of 4 CG smurfs films, was actually created for Doctor Manhattan’s junk for the original Watchmen film.
That's totally OK, because "some slacker animators figured out how to use the same tool that animated Dr. Manhattans giant blue cock for the Smurf hats in that insipid Smurf movie" is maybe the best bit of useless information I've been gifted in YEARS. I told my wife and she looked at me for probably 45 seconds before saying "what is wrong with you?". Perfect.
Panel 1
Waiter: "Sir, I’d like to ask you to take off your cap in this restaurant."
Smurf: "Take off my cap? You’re not asking me to take off my pants, are you?!"
Panel 2
Waiter: "That’s not the same."
Smurf: "That is the same."
Panel 3
Cook (to waiter): "Let him put his cap back on."
Waiter: "That’s maybe better."
The smurf's being asked to remove his hat since wearing it in a restaurant is considered impolite. When being pressed the smurf says 'I don't ask you to remove your pants'. When it's revealed the smurfs genitals are under his hat Dirkjan's mate says 'maybe we should let hem keep his hat on'.
Or maybe the artist was inspired by the connection of the Phrygian cap with psychedelic "liberty cap" mushrooms (Psilocybe semilanceata), which are distributed widely across Europe and associated with elves, fairies and various other wee folk?
I happen to know a person who experimented with eating dried caps and I don't think there exists a process that actually makes them harmless. Unless of course you're isolating muscimol, but I don't think that should count as eating the fungus.
While liver damage is mitigated by the fact that the organ in question regenerates, nerves don't.
Smurfette isn't an actual Smurf, she's a construct made by Gargamel (yes, this is actual Smurf canon), so presumably her hair is also some sort of construct.
> Somewhere along the line in the French Revolution, they adopted the freed slaves’ head gear as their own symbol of freedom, but picked the wrong one.
