Styling. The most iruportant qualities for hair are that it be
healthy, shining, and in a flattering, easy-to-manage style. Many fashion
magazines suggest hair styles according to the shape of the face in order
to make the face resemble as closely as possible the perfect oval. The circularity
of a round face may be minimized by a sleek, con trolled style with side
bangs. A square face needs a style that cuts across the square corners at
the temples and is full around the jaw. The best style for a long face also
rounds off the corners at the temples and is short. For a triangu lar face,
a narrow chin should be filled out with chin-length hair, while a wide chin
may be minimized with wide bangs. In finding the ri~ht hairstyle, however,
a woman should also consider the proportions of her whole figure, the texture
of her hair, her skill in handling it, and the character of her life.
Once a hair style is chosen, it must be main tained by regular washing,
setting, and, usually, cutting. Some women care for their hair princi p
ally at home, going to the hairdresser only in- frequently for a cut or
a shampoo and set for a special occasion. Many women go to the hair- dresser
once a week, while still others may see him every day for a combing.
Washing. Clean, healthy hair is the basis of any hair style. In addition
to brushing, dry hair requires shampooing once a week, oily hair per haps
every day. Shampoos are soapy or synthetic detergents in liquid, gel, lotion,
or cream form and may have special uses. There are nondn~ing shampoos for
normal hair, egg shampoos to add sheen to dry hair, and lemon shampoos to
cut extra oils in oily hair. There are hypoallergenic shampoos for sensitive
scalps, medicated sham ~005 for scalp problems, and special shampoos for
tinted or bleached hair.
Coloring Because hair coloring is constantly being improved and tested
scientifically and is subject to rigid quality controls, more women than
ever before can color their hair safely and achieve a natural effect. Most
errors stem from the user's carelessness. There are three types of hair
coloring available. Temporary rinses, which coat the hair shaft and
wash away with one shampoo, make no drastic change but add highlights and
blend in discolored streaks. Semi perl!Lanent rinses, which also
coat the hair shaft but last through four to eight shampoos, make hair slightly
darker (never hghter) and can ef. fectively cover gray hair. Because the
color im parted by these rinses fades gradually, it does not require retouching.
Permanent tints penetrate the hair shaft and permanently change the
pigment inside. The tint includes a bleaching agent, which removes the natural
hair color, and coloring matter, which gives a new color. In a one-color
process these actions take place at the same time. In a two- color process,
only for the most dramatic changes, the hair is bleached first and then
a toner (a very light shade) is applied to enliven the bleached hair. Retouching
is needed about every three weeks at the roots, where the darker hair grows
in. It should usually be done professionally be- cause overlapping of chemicals
can cause the hair to become overly porous and brittle. Streak ing is the
two-tone process applied to strands separated from the mass of hair.
Cutting Fundamental to a short hair style is the cut. A blunt cut
with scissors makes the ends -.of the hair straight. Cutting with a razor
tapers the ends so that they cling close to the head.
Setting and Waving. Most hair, especially if it is short, needs to
be arranged in a certain position while wet to give it shape when dry
Setting the most popular method of setting the hair is to
wrap small sections of wet hair around rollers, usually of plastic wire.
The result is relativel,' flexible, natur al-looking curls with a "hounce"
that add height and width to a hair style. Hair may also be set in flat
pin curls, which produce a very curly effect. There are many aids for setting
hair. Electric curlers (rollers) in dry hair quickly revive a set. Setting
lotions on wet hair help the set to hold its shape and last longer. Mter
a shampoo an instant conditioner (a protein-based lotion) add, "body"
(substance) and sheen to the hair, or a cream rinse makes hair softer and
less dry.
Permanent Waving Some women, especidll~ those with straight or fine
hair, may want a permanent wave, which gives the hair "hod'."
and adaptability to a set. In the modern co)d wave the hair is wrapped around
plastic rods and treated with a permanent wave s~ution. Mter a time the
rods are removed and a neutral izer is applied to stop the waving action
and lock in the new wave pattern. As a result, the structure of the hair
is actually changed so that after the set that must follow each shampoo,
the hair falls easily back into line. Permanent waves may be in several
strengths: super waves for hard-to-curl hair, regular "'a,~es for more
casual styles or relatively curly hair. and body waves to give hair a soft,
curving line. There are also permanent waves for gray hair and children's
hair. Naturally curly hair can be straightened by a permanent wave in reverse.
Combing Out The final step in creating a hair style is to comb out
the hair. Once the set hair is dry, the rollers or pins are removed, and
the hair is brushed to distribute the curl evenly and to achieve a smooth
line. If hair lacks desired height or fullness, it may be "teased"
(back combed) to add bulk under the top hair, which is then smoothed down
to follow the co~tour of the head. Then the hair is lifted slightl~"
l)y the handle of a rattail comb, and hair spray is lightl'. applied to
help hold the style in place.
Ancient World. In early and primitive socities the simplest hair
style, worn by the common people, was long or cropped hair usually held
in a fillet or band. Aristocrats developed distinctive and more complex
styles. Sumerian noblewomen. for example, dressed their hair in a heavy,
netted chignon, rolls, and plaits around the head or Ietting it fall thickly
over the shoulders. They also powdered it with gold dust or scented yellow
starch and adorned it with gold hairpins and other ornaments. Babilonian
and Assyrian men dyed their long hair and square beards black and crimped
and curled them with curling irons. sometimes wigs were worn. Persian nobles
also curled their hair and beards and stained them red with henna.
Egyptian noblemen and noblewomen clipped their hair close; later, for coolness
and cleanliness in the hot climate they shaved their heads with bronze razors.
On ceremonial occasions, for protection from the sun, they wore heavy, usually
black wigs. These were in short curly shapes or long and full in curls or
braids and were adorned with ivory knobbed hairpins, fillets, fresh flowers
or gold ornaments. Men shaved their faces and wore stiff false beards. In
classical Greece, men wore short hair and often beards. Later they were
shaved. Women's long hair was drawn back loosely or bound into a chignon,
later a melon shape. Both sexes wore fillets, and the upper classes used
curling irons. Some women dyed their hair red (or in Athens even
blue, dusted with gold, white, or red powder), and others adorned it with
flowers, ribbons, and jeweled tiaras.
In austere republican Rome, men and women generally followed simple Greek
styles, but under the empire the upper classes used curling irons and the
men dusted their hair with colored powder or gold dust. Women dyed their
hair bond with yellow soap or wore ebony wigs or wigs made from the blond
hair of captive barbarians. Their hair was piled high in curls and braids,
sometimes arranged on crescent-shaped wire frames. Throughout the ancient
world hair- dressing and shaving were accomplished by domestic slaves or
in public barbershops.
The Non-Western World-Tbe Muslim World and the East Among
Muslims, traditionally, the hair was modestly concealed in public under
the man's headdoth, turban, or fez or the woman's veil. Both men and women,
however, attended their respective hammams (public baths), where
the men were shaved (sometimes the whole head except for the long topknot)
and their beards were trimmed. The women's long hair was washed and often
given a henna rinse.
In China, men traditionally shaved the front hair and combed the back hair
into a queue braided with horsehair or black silk. Worn by the Manchus and
imposed by them on their Chinese subjects in the 17th century as a sign
of submission, the queue was also a mark of dignity and manhood. To pull
it was a grave insult. Chinese women combed their hair back, sometimes under
a bandeau, into a low knot, which might be decorated with jeweled combs,
hairpins, or flowers. Unmarried girls wore long plaits.
In Japan, traditionally, men usually shaved the front and top of the head,
leaving a little stiif pigtail at the back of the crown. Women's hair in
the medieval period streamed down their backs. After the introduction of
pommade in the 17 th century, women's hair was swept and arranged with combs,
bars, ribbons, and long ornarnental hairpins, revealing the nape of the
neck, which was thought to be especially appealing, The Geisha's lacquered
coiffures, which often were wigs, were especially elaborate.
Africa Africans developed complex hair styles
indicative of status. Some ivolved shaving the head, dyeing the hair with
red earth and grease, bleaching it with ammonia, Or stiffening
it with dung. Among the Masai, for example, nonwarriors and women shaved
their heads while warriors tied their front hair into three sections of
tiny braids and their back hair into a waist-length queue. Mangbetu women
arranged thin plaits over a cylinder-shaped basket frame with a flared top
and stuck it full of long flat bone needles used also to groom their finger-
nails. Such hair styles took hours to achieve and were left untouched for
weeks. Somewhat simpler were the styles of Miango maidens, who combed their
kerchief-covered hair back into a long queue tied with leafy branches, or
of Ibo girls, who shaved their heads and thereafter let the hair grow only
according to an elaborate pattern chalked on their skulls.
Pre-Columbian America In the pre-Columbian era the heads of
North American East Coast Indian men were generally entirely shaven, with
shell or stone knives, save for a ridge, or comb, of hair along the crown
of the head. Plains Indians wore two long plaits, as Indian women did generally.
Farther south in more civilized regions, more complex styles developed,
such as the large whorled squash-blossom arrangement over the ears of marriageable
Hopi girls. Mixtec women drew their hair into a bun under a horned turban,
while Aztec women braided their hair with colored material and wound it
round their heads, as they still do in some parts of Mexico. Among Aztec
warriors a ridge of hair indicated that he had taken many prisoners. Maya
nobles, who wore high head dresses, app ar to have shaved their artificially
elongated skulls. Inca chiefs wore relatively short hair, with a headband
wrapped around five times; nobles and commoners had progressively longer
hair and fewer turns of the headband.
The Western World-Middle Ages and Renaissance The barbarians
who overran Europe in the Middle Ages wore long flowing ]ocks and beards.
From the 9 th century, nobles on the Continent wore short hair (to the neck)
and were clean shaven. After the Norman Conquest of the stilllong haired
English, Continental fashion changed, requiring beards and long curled hair,
filled out with false hair. In the 13 th and 14 th centuries the hair was
neatly rolled at the neck in page boy style. The pudding-basin, ear-revealing
style of the early 15th century was superseded~ longer page-boy style, rough
in the north
meticulously curled and combed in Italy. The clergy were distinguished by
the tonsure, a shaved patch on the head. Its precise shap disputed by the
Celtic and Roman churches, in the 7 th century, whole crown was finally
established, according to Roman usage.
The influence of the church, always concerned for modesty, encouraged married
noblewomen to veil their long plaits entwined with ribbons and false hair.
In the 13 th and 14 th centuries thev coiled their plaits over the ears
or bundled them into gold or silver cauls (nets) or concealed hair, neck,
and chin with a linen wimple, all these styles finished off by a veil or
kerchief. In the 15 th century, fashionable ladies of northern Europe plucked
their hairline to make their foreheads seem higher and scraped their hair
back under an elaborate homed, pointed, or wired headdress. In the warmer
climate of Italy, women displayed their hair in plaits and under low, jeweled
turbans, bandeaus, or caps. Both men and women strove to achieve blond hair
by either using a bleach or saffron or onion skin dye, or, in the case of
Italian women, by sitting for hours in a crownless hat in the sun.
In the 16th century, after Francis I of France accidentally burned his hair
with a torch, men wore short hair and grew short beards and moustaches.
Women's hair was tucked under stiffened, lappeted hoods (caps in Italy),
which gradually became smaller, revealing more hair as did small soft toques.
The front hair was frizzed around the face and brushed over metal hoops
or rolls. The back hair was coiled up in a net out of the way of the high
collar. Blond or, in England, red hair, like Queen Elizabeth's, was popular,
and false hair and wigs were used. Hair was dusted with powder or flour
for blonds, violet for brunettes, and white for the gray-and held in place
by gum or rotten oak paste. Lead combs were believed to presse and restore
color to the hair. Jewels, feathers. and ornamental hairpins provided decoration.
17th and 18th Centuries. In the first half of the 17 th century
fashionable men wore lonc curled hair, often oiled, falling over wide, white
collars. Frequently they displayed a longer lock tied with a bow, a neat
moustache and a small, pointed beard, the Vandyke. Later in the 17
th century men shaved their faces and their beads, covering their heads
with caps at home or long, full-bottomed, curled wigs in public.
Women's hair in the first part of the 17th cen tury was flat on top with
fringe on the forehead; wide crimped puffs, then bunched long curls over
wire frames at the sides; and a coil high in back decorated with rosettes
or a fine linen or lace cap. Gradually the butline became high and narrow
as the cap became the tall, lacy fontange.
In the 18th century, men continued to wear wigs but generally smaller and
lighter ones, powdered white. Some wigs were tied back into a queue encased
in a black silk bag, some were braided, and some were held by a black bow.
The law, the army, and the navy each had its own style of wig. Some men
wore their own hair n a queue.
In the early part of the 18th century, women had trim little crimped or
curled heads, powdered and decorated with garlands or bows. Widows, middle-class
women, and women at home wore tiny caps. By the 1770's coiffures built over
horsehair pads or wire cages, stuck with pomatum, and powdered with starch
mounted three feet in the air. Some had springs to adjust the height. They
were extravagantly adorned with feathers, ribbons, jewels, and even ships,
gardens, and menageries. Such constructions required several hours work
every one to three weeks. Between sessions the undisturbed coiffure was
likely to attract vermin. In the 1780's a reaction against formality and
extravagance led to the hérisson(hedgehog) style for men and
women, a loose, bushy mass of curls.
By this time hairdressers formed a distinct profession. The best were men,
many of them trained as wigmakers. Especially notable was Legros de Rumigny,
a former baker, who became court hairdresser in France, published the Art
de la coiffure des dames (1765), and opened an Academie de Coiffure
in 1769.
19th Century The French Revolution and Empire and the accompanying
taste for simplicity and the antique had a great effect on hair styles.
Both men and women cut their hair very short, like the Roman emperors, or
women twisted their hair into Greek knots, with short curls framing the
face, or later into smooth plaits around the head. They also wore colored
wigs.
Gradually as men became more concerned with commerce, they spent less time
on their hair. In the 19 th century they kept it relatively short, sometimes
curled and dressed with macassar oil. Most men wore some variety of mous
tache, sideburns, or beard.
By the 1830's women were dressing their hair standing rolls or loops on
the crown, held by ribbons and combs, and short curls clustered at the temples.
Beginning in the 1840's heads were sleek and demure, the hair oiled and
smoothed down over the temples with long sausage curls at the side later
with a heavy chignon of curls or Plaits in 'back. In the 1880's the front
hair formed a crimped fringe. In the 1890's the pompadour of the Gibson
Girl was combed over a pad making a high wide frame for the face, and swept
up behind. Curls, crimping, and the natural-looking marcel wave were achieved
by the use of heated irons, including the waving iron invented by the French
hairdresser Marcel Grateau in the 1870's.
20th Century As a result of World War I, women everywhere
cut or "bobbed" their hair as a symbol of their political and
social emancipa tion. There followed a succession of short, head- clinging
hair styles inspired by film stars-the page boy of Garbo, the peek-a-boo
of Veronica Lake. Short hair greatly increased the popularity of the permanent
wave, invented by the German Charles Nessler about 1905. The early permanents
required heat, took 12 hours, and sometimes gave a frizzy effect. Later
the cold wave, with chemicals, simplified the process.
In the 1950's the invention of rollers for wav ing made possible the very
short, layered Italian cut As young, active, informal women discarded hats,
hair styIes, bouffant styles and the smooth, geometric cuts became more
important. In the 1960's the availability of natural-looking hair pieces
in the form of full wigs, half wigs, or long falls, at all prices, enabled
almost every woman to own one or more to suit her taste and mood.
Men's hair in the 20th century was generally simple and short, even to the
point of the brush- like crew cut, and most men were clean shaven. In the
1960's the nonconformist young started a trend toward longer hair and side
burns or beards to suit their unconventional clothes. Some went to wild-looking
extremes; others chose moderate, well-groomed styles to the nape of the
neck, trimmed to flatter the shape of the head. Such styles were created
or copied in the newly established men's hairdressing salons that offered
scissor or razor cuts, lotions, drying in nets, hairspray, and coloring.
Professional Requirements In the 20th century a hairdresser
must fulfill professional requirements. In the United States he must attend
a cosmetology school, generally for 1,000 hours of training, in order to
receive a state license to practice. In Europe he must serve an apprentice
ship of from one to five years before registering to practice.