Baldness, full or partial, was considered an unsightly defect and concealed by wigs.
Like the Assyrians, the Greeks during the Homeric period favored long, curly hair. They believed that long hair, and difficult-to-achieve hair styles, distinguished them from the barbarians in the north, who sported short, unattended hair. “Fragrant and divine curls” became a Greek obsession, as revealed by countless references in prose and poetry.
Fair hair was esteemed. Most of the great Greek heroes—Achilles, Menelaus, Paris, to mention a few—are described as possessing light-colored locks. And those not naturally blond could lighten or redden their tresses with a variety of harsh soaps and alkaline bleaches from Phoenicia, then the soap center of the Mediterranean.
Men in particular took considerable measures to achieve lighter hair shades. For temporary coloring, they dusted hair with a talc of yellow pollen, yellow flour, and fine gold dust. Menander, the fourth-century B.C. Athenian dramatist, wrote of a more permanent method: “The sun’s rays are the best means for lightening the hair, as our men well know.” Then he describes one practice: “After washing their hair with a special ointment made here in Athens, they sit bareheaded in the sun by the hour, waiting for their hair to turn a beautiful golden blond. And it does.”
In 303 B.C., the first professional barbers, having formed into guilds, opened shops in Rome.
Roman social standards mandated well-groomed hair, and tonsorial neglect was often treated with scorn or open insult. Eschewing the Greek ideal of golden-blond hair, Roman men of high social and political rank favored dark-to-black hair. Aging Roman consuls and senators labored to conceal graying hair. The first-century Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder wrote candidly of the importance of dark hair dyes. A preferred black dye was produced by boiling walnut shells and leeks. But to prevent graying in the first place, men were advised to prepare a paste, worn overnight, of herbs and earthworms. The Roman antidote for baldness was an unguent of crushed myrtle berries and bear grease.
A tonsorial obsession. Assyrians oiled, perfumed, tinted and curled their tresses. Only a coiffed soldier was fit for battle.
Not all societies favored blond or dark hair. Early Saxon men (for reasons that remain a mystery) are depicted in drawings with hair and beards dyed powder blue, bright red, green, or orange. The Gauls, on the other hand, were known to favor reddish hair dyes. And in England when Elizabeth I was arbiter of fashion, prominent figures of the day—male and female—dyed their hair a bright reddish orange, the queen’s color. An ambassador to court once noted that Elizabeth’s hair was “of a light never made by nature.”
Although men and women had powdered their hair various colors since before the Christian era, the practice became the rule of fashion in sixteenth-century France. The powder, liberally applied to real hair and wigs, was bleached and pulverized wheat flour, heavily scented. By the 1790s, at the court of Marie Antoinette, powdering, and all forms of hair dressing generally, reached a frenzied peak. Hair was combed, curled, and waved, and supplemented by mounds of false hair into fantastic towers, then powdered assorted colors. Blue, pink, violet, yellow, and white—each had its vogue.
At the height of hair powdering in England, Parliament, to replenish the public treasury, taxed hair powders. The returns were projected at a quarter of a million pounds a year. However, political upheaval with France and Spain, to say nothing of a capricious change in hair fashion that rendered powdering passé, drastically reduced the revenue collected.
Modern Hair Coloring: 1909, France
Permanent coloring of the hair has never been a harmless procedure. The risk of irritation, rash, and cellular mutations leading to cancer are present even with today’s tested commercial preparations. Still, they are safer than many of the caustic formulations used in the past.
The first successful attempt to develop a safe commercial hair dye was undertaken in 1909 by French chemist Eugene Schueller. Basing his mixture on a newly identified chemical, paraphenylenediamine, he founded the French Harmless Hair Dye Company. The product initially was not an impressive seller (though it would become one), and a year later Schueller conceived a more glamorous company name: L’Oréal.
Still, most women resisted in principle the idea of coloring their hair. That was something done by actresses. As late as 1950, only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair. By comparison, the figure today is 75 percent. What brought about the change in attitude?
In large measure, the modern hair-coloring revolution came not through a safer product, or through a one-step, easy-to-use formulation, but through clever, image-changing advertising.
The campaign was spearheaded largely by Clairol.
A New York copywriter, Shirley Polykoff, conceived two phrases that quickly became nationwide jargon: “Does She or Doesn’t She?” and “Only Her Hairdresser Knows for Sure.” The company included a child in every pictorial advertisement, to suggest that the adult model with colored hair was a respectable woman, possibly a mother.
Ironically, it was the double entendre in “Does She or Doesn’t She?” that raised eyebrows and consequently generated its own best publicity. “Does she or doesn’t she what?” people joked. Life magazine summarily refused to print the advertisement because of its blatant suggestiveness. To counter this resistance, Clairol executives challenged Life’s all-male censor panel to test the advertisement on both men and women. The results were astonishing, perhaps predictable, and certainly revealing. Not a single woman saw sexual overtones in the phrase, whereas every man did.
Life relented. The product sold well. Coloring hair soon ceased to be shocking. By the late 1960s, almost 70 percent of American women—and two million men—altered their natural hair color. Modern-day Americans had adopted a trend that was popular more than three thousand years ago. The only difference in the past was that the men coloring their hair outnumbered the women.
Wigs: 3000 B.C., Egypt
Although the Assyrians ranked as the preeminent hair stylists of the ancient world, the Egyptians, some fifteen hundred years earlier, made an art of wigs. In the Western world, they originated the concept of using artificial hair, although its function was most often not to mask baldness but to complement formal, festive attire.
Many Egyptian wigs survive in excellent condition in museums today. Chemical analyses reveal that their neatly formed plaits and braids were made from both vegetable fiber and human hair.
Some decorative hairpieces were enormous. And weighty. The wig Queen Isimkheb, in 900 B.C., wore on state occasions made her so top-heavy that attendants were required to help her walk. Currently in the Cairo Museum, the wig was chemically tested and found to be woven entirely of brown human hair. As is true of other wigs of that time, its towering style was held in place with a coating of beeswax.
Blond wigs became a craze in Rome, beginning in the first century B.C. Whereas Greek courtesans preferred bleaching or powdering their own hair, Roman women opted for fine flaxen hair from the heads of German captives. It was made into all styles of blond wigs. Ovid, the first-century Roman poet, wrote that no Roman, man or woman, had ever to worry about baldness given the abundance of German hair to be scalped at will.
Blond wigs eventually became the trademark of Roman prostitutes, and even of those who frequented them. The dissolute empress Messalina wore a “yellow wig” when she made her notorious rounds of the Roman brothels. And Rome’s most detestable ruler, Caligula, wore a similar wig on nights when he prowled the streets in search of pleasure. The blond wig was as unmistakable as the white knee boots and miniskirt of a contemporary streetwalker.
The Christian Church tried repeatedly to stamp out all wearing of wigs, for whatever purpose. In the first century, church fathers ruled that a wigged person could not receive a Christian blessing. In the next century, Tertullian, the Greek theologian, preached that “All wigs are such disguises and inventions of the devil.” And in the following century, Bishop Cyprian forbade Christians in wigs or toupees to
attend church services, declaiming, “What better are you than pagans?”
Such condemnation peaked in A.D. 692. That year, the Council of Constantinople excommunicated Christians who refused to give up wearing wigs.
Even Henry IV, who defied the Church in the twelfth century over the king’s right to appoint bishops and was subsequently excommunicated, adhered to the Church’s recommended hair style—short, straight, and unadorned. Henry went so far as to prohibit long hair and wigs at court. Not until the Reformation of 1517, when the Church was preoccupied with the more pressing matter of losing members, did it ease its standards on wigs and hair styles.
A cartoon captures the burden of false hair in an era when wigs were weighty and required hours of attention.
By 1580, wigs were again the dernier cri in hair fashion.
One person more than any other was responsible for the return of curled and colored wigs: Elizabeth I, who possessed a huge collection of red-orange wigs, used mainly to conceal a severely receding hairline and thinning hair.
Wigs became so commonplace they often went unnoticed. The fact that Mary, Queen of Scots wore an auburn wig was unknown even by people well acquainted with her; they learned the truth only when she was beheaded. At the height of wig popularity in seventeenth-century France, the court at Versailles employed forty full-time resident wigmakers.
Once again, the Church rose up against wigs. But this time the hierarchy was split within its own ranks, for many priests wore the fashionable long curling wigs of the day. According to a seventeenth-century account, it was not uncommon for wigless priests to yank wigs off clerics about to serve mass or invoke benediction. One French clergyman, Jean-Baptiste Thiers from Champrond, published a book on the evils of wigs, the means of spotting wig wearers, and methods of sneak attack to rip off false hair.
The Church eventually settled the dispute with a compromise. Wigs were permitted on laymen and priests who were bald, infirm, or elderly, although never in church. Women received no exemption.
In eighteenth-century London, wigs worn by barristers were so valuable they were frequently stolen. Wig stealers operated in crowded streets, carrying on their shoulders a basket containing a small boy. The boy’s task was to suddenly spring up and seize a gentleman’s wig. The victim was usually discouraged from causing a public fuss by the slightly ridiculous figure he cut with a bared white shaven head. Among barristers, the legal wig has remained part of official attire into the twentieth century.
Hairpin: 10,000 Years Ago, Asia
A bodkin, a long ornamental straight pin, was used by Greek and Roman women to fasten their hair. In shape and function it exactly reproduced the slender animal spines and thistle thorns used by earlier men and women and by many primitive tribes today. Ancient Asian burial sites have yielded scores of hairpins of bone, iron, bronze, silver, and gold. Many are plain, others ornately decorated, but they all clearly reveal that the hairpin’s shape has gone unchanged for ten thousand years.
Cleopatra preferred ivory hairpins, seven to eight inches long and studded with jewels. The Romans hollowed out their hairpins to conceal poison. The design was similar to that of the pin Cleopatra is reputed to have used in poisoning herself.
The straight hairpin became the U-shaped bobby pin over a period of two centuries.
Wig fashion at the seventeenth-century French court necessitated that a person’s real hair be either clipped short or pinned tightly to the head. Thus “bobbed,” it facilitated slipping on a wig as well as maintaining a groomed appearance once the wig was removed. Both large straight pins and U-shaped hairpins were then called “bobbing pins.” In England, in the next century, the term became “bobby pin.” When small, two-pronged pins made of tempered steel wire and lacquered black began to be mass-produced in the nineteenth-century, they made straight hairpins virtually obsolete and monopolized the name bobby pin.
Hair Dryer: 1920, Wisconsin
The modern electric hair dryer was the offspring of two unrelated inventions, the vacuum cleaner and the blender. Its point of origin is well known: Racine, Wisconsin. And two of the first models—named the “Race” and the “Cyclone” —appeared in 1920, both manufactured by Wisconsin firms, the Racine Universal Motor Company and Hamilton Beach.
The idea of blow-drying hair originated in early vacuum cleaner advertisements.
In the first decade of this century, it was customary to promote several functions for a single appliance, especially an electrical appliance, since electricity was being touted as history’s supreme workhorse. The stratagem increased sales; and people had come to expect multifunction gadgets.
The vacuum cleaner was no exception. An early advertisement for the so-called Pneumatic Cleaner illustrated a woman seated at her vanity, drying her hair with a hose connected to the vacuum’s exhaust. With a why-waste-hot-air philosophy, the caption assured readers that while the front end of the machine sucked up and safely trapped dirt, the back end generated a “current of pure, fresh air from the exhaust.” Although early vacuum cleaners sold moderately well, no one knows how many women or men got the most out of their appliance.
The idea of blow-drying hair had been hatched, though. What delayed development of a hand-held electric hair dryer was the absence of a small, efficient, low-powered motor, known technically among inventors as a “fractional horsepower motor.”
Enter the blender.
Racine, Wisconsin, is also the hometown of the first electric milk shake mixer and blender. (See page 111.) Although a blender would not be patented until 1922, efforts to perfect a fractional horsepower motor to run it had been under way for more than a decade, particularly by the Racine Universal Motor Company and Hamilton Beach.
Thus, in principle, the hot-air exhaust of the vacuum cleaner was married to the compact motor of the blender to produce the modern hair dryer, manufactured in Racine. Cumbersome, energy-inefficient, comparatively heavy, and frequently overheating, the early hand-held dryer was, nonetheless, more convenient for styling hair than the vacuum cleaner, and it set the trend for decades to come.
Improvements in the ’30s and ’40s involved variable temperature settings and speeds. The first significant variation in portable home dryers appeared in Sears, Roebuck’s 1951 fall—winter catalogue. The device, selling for $12.95, consisted of a hand-held dryer and a pink plastic bonnet that connected directly to the blower and fitted over the woman’s head.
Hair dryers were popular with women from the year they debuted. But it was only in the late 1960s, when men began to experience the difficulty of drying and styling long hair, that the market for dryers rapidly expanded.
Comb: Pre-4000 B.C., Asia and Africa
The most primitive comb is thought to be the dried backbone of a large fish, which is still used by remote African tribes. And the comb’s characteristic design is apparent in the ancient Indo-European source of our word “comb,” gombhos, meaning “teeth.”
The earliest man-made combs were discovered in six-thousand-year-old Egyptian tombs, and many are of clever design. Some have single rows of straight teeth, some double rows; and others possess a first row thicker and longer than the second. A standard part of the Egyptian man’s and woman’s vanity, the instrument served the dual function of combing hair and of pinning a particular style in place.
Archaeologists claim that virtually all early cultures independently developed and made frequent use of combs—all, that is, except the Britons.
Dwelling along the coastline of the British Isles, these early peoples wore their hair unkempt (even during occupation by the Romans, themselves skilled barbers). They are believed to have adopted the comb only after the Danish invasions, in 789. By the mid-800s, the Danes had settled throughout the kingdom, and it is they who are credited with teaching coastal Britons to comb their hair regularly.
In early Christian times, combing hair was also part of religious ceremonies, in a ritualistic manner similar to washing the feet. Careful directions exist for the prop
er way to comb a priest’s hair in the sacristy before vespers. Christian martyrs brought combs with them into the catacombs, where many implements of ivory and metal have been found. Religious historians suspect that the comb at one time had some special symbolic significance; they point to the mysterious fact that during the Middle Ages, many of the earliest stained-glass church windows contain unmistakable images of combs.
Magic, too, came to surround the comb. In the 1600s, in parts of Europe, it was widely accepted that graying hair could be restored to its original color by frequent strokes with a lead comb. Although it is conceivable that soft, low-grade, blackened lead might actually have been microscopically deposited on strands of hair, slightly darkening them, there is more evidence to suggest that the comber dyed his hair, then attributed the results to the instrument. The suspicion is supported by the fact that in the last few decades of the century, the term “lead comb” —as in “He uses a lead comb” —was the socially accepted euphemism for dyeing gray hair.
There were no real changes in comb design until 1960, when the first home electric styling comb originated in Switzerland.
Perfume: Pre-6000 B.C., Middle and Far East
Perfume originated at ancient sacred shrines, where it was the concern of priests, not cosmeticians. And in the form of incense, its original function, it survives today in church services.
The word itself is compounded from per and fumus, Latin for “through the smoke.” And that precisely describes the manner in which the fragrant scents reached worshipers: carried in the smoke of the burning carcass of a sacrificial animal.
Foraging man, preoccupied with the quest for food, believed the greatest offering to his gods was part of his most precious and essential possession, a slaughtered beast. Perfume thus originated as a deodorizer, sprinkled on a carcass to mask the stench of burning flesh. The Bible records that when Noah, having survived the Flood, burned animal sacrifices, “the Lord smelled the sweet odor” —not of flesh but of incense.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 31