Hairstyles and Fashion: History of Hairstyling Culture

Standards for beauty have changed tremendously depending on the time and the place.

As long as we remain social animals, hairdressing will always have a role to play in the quest for status and reproduction. “Humans” according to Robin Bryer “are unique in two aspects of their behavior: wearing clothes and having their hair cut voluntarily” .

Hairdressing is part of the human condition.

Hairdressing Culture

One assumes that the very first hairdos were long and dirty but even with the usual squalor atop primitive heads, it is highly probable that some hair was classed more attractive and beautiful compared to others. What is definitely true is that wherever primitive society formed a civilization, they formed a culture of hairdressing.

Hair Fashions: The First Five Thousand Years written by Richard Corson talks about a seventeenth-century description of a teenage woman who tried to turn her hair blonde. After exposure to the sun for a few hours and scrubbing it with a coloring solution that initially seemed to do the trick, she was condemned to an almost daily nosebleed and
“being desirous to stop the Blood by the pressing of her Nostrils, not far from her right Eye toward her Temple, through a pore, as it were by a hole made with a needles point, the Blood burst out abundantly, and … she was diseased by the obstruction of her courses. “

Leave a Comment