Customs and Fashions in Old New England
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the manner in which the French ladies wore their hair some years ago. Instead of powdering they often wash the head, which answers the purpose well enough as their own hair is commonly of an agreeable light color, but the more fashionable among them begin to adopt the European fashion of setting off the head to the best advantage."
The fashion of the roll was of much importance, and various shaped rolls were advertised; we find one of "a modish new roll weighing but 8 ounces when others weigh fourteen ounces." We can well believe that such a heavy roll made poor Anna Winslow's head "ach and itch like anything." A Salem hairdresser, who employed twelve barbers, advertised thus in 1773: "Ladies shall be attended to in the polite constructions of rolls such as may tend to raise their heads to any pitch they desire." The grotesqueness of such adornment found frequent ridicule in prose and verse. One poet sang: "Give Chloe a bushel of horsehair and wool,
Of paste and pomatum a pound, Ten yards of gay ribbon to deck her sweet skull And gauze to encompass it round. "Of all the gay colours the rainbow displays Be those ribbons which hang on her head, Be her flowers adapted to make the folks gaze, And about the whole work be they spread. "Let her flaps fly behind for a yard at the least, Let her curls meet just under her chin, Let those curls be supported to keep up the list, With an hundred instead of one pin." We can easily see that after such rough treatment the hair needed restoring waters; and indeed from earliest times hair-restorers and hair-dyes did these "vain ancients" use. "Women with juice of herbs gray locks disguised." In these days of manifold mysterious nostrums that gild the head of declining age and make glad the waste places on bald young masculine pates, let us read the simple receipts of the good old times: "Take half a pound of Aqua Mellis in the Springtime of the Year, warm a little of it every morning when you rise in a Sawcer, and tie a little Spunge to a fine Box combe, and dip it in the water and therewith moisten the roots of the hair in Combing it, and it will grow long and thick and curled in a very short time."
"Take three spoonfuls of Honey and a good handful of Vine Twigs that twist like Wire, and beat them wel, and strain their Juyce into the Honey and anoynt the Bald Places therewith."
Here is what Captain Sam Ingersoll of Salem used, or at any rate had the formula of, in 1685: "A Metson to make a mans heare groe when he is bald. Take sume fier flies & sum Redd wormes & black snayls and sum hume bees and dri them and pound them & mixt them in milk or water."
These washes were not so expensive as Hirsutus or Tricopherous, but quite as effective perhaps. There were hair-dyes, too, "to make hair grow black though any other color," and the leaf that holds this precious These pages are © Laurel O'Donnell, 2005, all rights reserved
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