Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (44 page)

The Assyrians developed hair styling to the exclusion of nearly every other cosmetic art. Law even dictated certain types of coiffures according to a person’s position and employment. And, as was the case in Egypt, high-ranking women, during official court business, donned stylized fake beards to assert that they could be as authoritative as men.

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.