Every Day Is Special: hair

Showing posts with label hair. Show all posts

December 29 - Happy Birthday, Madame de Pompadour

Posted on December 29, 2021

This is an update of my post published on December 29, 2010:

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 folks to gain 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.

The thing that is odd is that Madame de Pompadour herself never wore her hair this way, nor were the popular hairstyles of her time related to what we now call the pompadour!

But hairdos before and after Madame de Pompadour's time included the vertical-enhanced styles - sometimes quite exaggerated, like this old-time style:

...and this modern style:

In more recent times, Pompadour hairstyles have been associated with women in the 1940s, men in the 1950s - including Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash - Italian and Mexican Americans, Japanese gangs, and Conan O'Brien!

Learn about Hair History!

Take a quick tour of hair history with Bellatory.

Ancient Egypt
Ancient Greece
Medieval Europe (plus this website on how to braid)
Elizabethan Era
1700s
Victorian Era
1930s
Other 1900s
History of Ringlets
Japanese Hairstyles

I grew up with long-straight hair -

with or without bangs - being in style.

And I still love the look!

Also, I love Cher

(pictured above and below)!

Also on this date:

Scientist Carl Ludwig's birthday
(he's a pioneer in the study of urine!)

Kulig in Poland

President Andrew Johnson's birthday

Anniversary of a language going extinct

Birthday of Elizabeth of Russia

Explorer and scientist Joaquin de Acosta's birthday

Anniversary of Texas's statehood

Tick Tock Day

Anniversary of Emma Snodgrass being arrested for wearing pants!

Birthday of musician and molecular biologist Dexter Holland

Independence Day in Mongolia

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest pages on:

December holidays
December birthdays
Historical anniversaries in December

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

October 8 - Better Hair Styling Through Chemistry (?)

Posted on October 8, 2021

This is an update of my post published on October 8, 2010:

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 Nestle ever convince women to let him put cow urine on their hair, let alone the danger and the heat and the six hours???

And not JUST women. Take a look at this little girl:

Is the little girl sitting on a pile of diapers because
no one her age could be expected to sit still
for SIX HOURS without going to the bathroom?!

Shockingly, the ads for Nestle's permanent wave showed the results
(below), but not the procedure itself (above).

By the way...

The first person Nestle 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!