December 29, 2010

Happy Birthday, Madame de Pompadour 

One of the most influential French women of her day, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson was born on this day in 1721. She became Marquise de Pompadour and great companion of King Louis XV, she aided some to more elevated positions in court, and she was a patroness of such intellectuals as Voltaire and Diderot. We are mostly familiar with her name, however, for a hairdo named after her!

A pompadour is a hairstyle in which hair is brushed up from the forehead, often into a clip or a roll. It is often achieved with the use of hair gel (or even, back in the day, with wax), with a pad or hair appliance that produces a “bump,” or by ratting some hair and then combing other hair high and over.

Although Madame de Pompadour made the style popular with French women of the 1700s, it is also associated with the 1950s and Elvis Presley, rockabilly and Johnny Cash, Italian and Mexican Americans, Japanese gangs, and Conan O'Brien!

Learn about Hair History!

Best bet for a quick tour of hair history: The Way of the Hair. 

• Ancient Egypt 
• Ancient Greece 
• Medieval Europe  (plus this website on how to braid)
• Elizabethan Era 
• 1800s 
• Victorian Era 
• 1930s 
• Other 1900s 
• Hats and Hair in History 
• History of Ringlets 
• Japanese Hair History 

October 8, 2010

Better Hair Styling Through Chemistry (?) – 1905 

On this day in 1905, a German hair stylist in London demonstrated the first “permanent wave.”

Karl Ludvig Nessler (Nestle) used a mixture of cow urine and water on the hair to break the bonds of the hair and then reform them in a new shape, molded around rods the hair had been wrapped around. His machine looked a bit like a cow-milking machine, because it was dangerous to have the caustic chemicals near the skin, so a complicated system of countering weights were suspended from a stand above the seated customer. (This procedure only worked on long hair because of the need to keep stuff away from the scalp. The photos here are of slightly later models.) The machine then heated up the hair to about 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius). The procedure took about six hours.

Ridiculous, eh? How did he ever convince women to let him put cow urine on their hair, let alone the danger and the heat and the six hours???

By the way...

• The first person Nessler used his method on was his wife—and it burned off all her hair and gave her scalp burns! When her hair grew back, he tried a slightly different procedure—and burned her hair off again. But the third time was the charm!

• The chemicals and machines used changed (of course) to make perming less dangerous and time-consuming, and by the 1930s the perm had really caught on. The majority of middle class women and virtually all the rich and famous women permed their hair regularly, perhaps four times a year!

• Thankfully, by 1938 someone invented the cold wave, which required no machine and no heat!

• Nowadays there are alkaline and acid perms, endothermic and exothermic perms, digital perms and home perms—plus chemical straightening of the hair.