She brushed a lock of fiery ringlets behind one ear...

Can I talk about one of my pet peeves? I have a lot of pet peeves when it comes to writing. This one, unfortunately, pops up a lot, because it's something that tends to happen in the opening paragraphs of a story.

What am I talking about? The awkward, self-aware, overly vibrant description of a character's eyes and hair. Nothing says amateur hour to me like seeing one of these shoehorned into the first three paragraphs

There you are, getting interested in the plot, reading some dialogue, wondering what that explosion was--when some random sentence appears where the character focuses her icy sapphire eyes onto the object of her attention, and brushes a wayward strand of straight black hair out of her face. It's always the hair and eyes, too. Never an earring, a freckle, or a double chin. Some authors place tremendous importance on the color of hair and eyes, and the reader absolutely must know right away so we can be sure to picture the right thing dammit. 

I have about a thousand reasons for hating this. I'm not sure they really matter. I suppose I can share some of my thinking...

1. It's really not that important.
2. It's almost always an aside or a distraction--totally non-relevant.
3. No one thinks about their own hair and eyes like that.
4. It's really not that important.
5. The synonyms people can come up with for colors make me cringe.
6. Having a character "see" their own eye color is a POV violation in third-person-limited.
7. It's really not that important.

It's the kind of thing that... well, only amateurs seem to do. (I'm sure you can go find some famous book to prove me wrong, but... nyah nyah). It's awkward. It's inelegant. It places the reader's attention in the wrong place.

Sure, there are cases where such things can be important, such as a society where a certain appearance is stigmatized, or if a character is unusual (eg an albino with red eyes, perhaps). And sure, it's not good if the reader goes along imagining one thing for half the book, and then it turns out some physical detail is important and they were imagining the character completely wrong.

But man.

I really hate seeing one of these in a first chapter. Even if an author knows it's not really appropriate to stuff it randomly into an opener, it's still pretty common to see it crop up before the chapter is out. Negative points if the character looks into a mirror or some other reflection. I prefer physical descriptions to be treated the same as everything else in the narrative: we learn it when it becomes relevant, and not a sentence before.