Midlife

Fashion histories tend to lose interest in women once they are no longer coded as youthful. Yet midlife is when many women had the most complex demands on their hair: professional expectations, care work, limited time, rules about what was “suitable” for their age, and the first decisions about grey hair.

Questions we ask

How did work and care labour limit the time available for hair?
Where did “age-appropriate” rules come from, and who enforced them?
How were colouring and greying presented — and chosen?

Problems with the evidence

Often ignored by fashion histories once a woman is no longer coded as youthful.
Advertising sets the terms of most surviving discussion.

Styles, techniques and themes for this age

Object · c. 1575 BCE to present

Curling tongs and the Marcel iron

Heated metal pincers for curling and waving hair — a tool with a history of more than three thousand years, from Egyptian bronze to the salon Marcel iron.
Object · 1880s to present in British collections

The hair dryer

From a stoneware bottle of boiling water to the row of humming salon hoods — how drying, the slowest part of every set, was turned into a machine.
Object · Ancient to present

The hairpin

The small, easily lost tool that holds up almost every dressed style in history — from decorated Roman bronze to the mass-produced wire grip.
Object · 1920s onwards; cold-wave kits from the 1940s

The home permanent kit

A box of lotions, rods and papers that brought the permanent wave out of the salon and into the kitchen — and, in some kits, onto children’s heads.
Essay

Age and hair

Who decides how a girl’s hair is worn, when that power passes to her, and what happens to it again in old age — a history told across a lifetime rather than a decade.
Essay

Black British hair

From suitcases packed with hot combs to Tottenham hair businesses, Brixton salons, Alexandra Palace hair shows and the Halo Code — a history of hair in Black British communities since 1945, told as skill, trade, family time and pleasure as well as struggle.
Essay

From kitchen to salon

Most hair work has always been done unpaid, at home, by mothers, sisters, friends and women themselves. This essay follows that labour into the paid salon — a trade, a workplace, a women’s business and a meeting place — mainly in Britain and Ireland, with American and diasporic comparison.
Essay

How trends travel

From engraved coiffure plates to TikTok, each new medium changed how fast a hairstyle could be seen. This essay follows the channels (prints, photographs, film, fan magazines, trade journals, television and platforms) and asks what evidence could ever show that a famous head caused many others to follow.
Essay

Rules about hair

Prisons, poorhouses, hospitals, kitchens, factories, schools and the army have all written rules about women’s and girls’ hair. This essay compares what the rules said with how they were enforced, separates genuine task-specific safety from demands for a particular look, and asks whose natural hair was treated as the problem — mainly in Britain, from the 1840s to today.
Essay

Heat, electricity and chemistry

Taps, shampoo, tongs, dryers, perm machines, relaxers, synthetic dyes, plastics and fibres all changed what could be done with hair. This essay asks what each one cost in time, labour and money — and who could afford it — mainly in Britain, with American comparison.
Style · Dressed style

The Afro

Coily hair worn in its own texture and shaped into a rounded form — a powerful image of pride and politics, and also a style people wore for many other reasons.
Style · Dressed style

The beehive

A tall, rounded dome of backcombed hair — one of the few styles with a named, dated creator, and a lesson in how a magazine commission could become a decade’s silhouette.
Style · Cut

The bob

A family of short cuts whose meanings kept changing — from a 1920s statement to 1960s geometry to a style so familiar it now barely registers.
Style · Braided, twisted or locked

Braids and plaits

One of the oldest ways of dressing hair — and not one style but many, from a school plait tied with a ribbon to cornrows, box braids and ancient braided wigs.
Style · Dressed style

The bun and chignon

Hair gathered, coiled and pinned — a form that has meant imperial elegance, respectable adulthood, workplace safety and, lately, deliberate messiness.
Style · Braided, twisted or locked

Locs

Rope-like strands formed as hair is allowed or encouraged to mat — worn across many cultures and faiths, and still penalised by some school and workplace rules.
Style · Dressed style

Victory rolls

Hair rolled high at the front and pinned — the style most people now picture for the 1940s, and one of the most revived.
Technique · Temporary setting

Finger waving

Shaping wet hair with fingers and a comb into rippling S-shaped ridges — the signature set of the late 1920s and 1930s, and a test of skill.
Style · Addition or covering

Wigs and hairpieces

Added hair is part of hair culture, not "fake hair" — from ancient plaited wigs to Victorian switches, 1960s fashion wigs, extensions and wigs worn through illness.
Technique · Temporary setting

Marcel waving

A deep, regular wave made with heated irons — a salon skill that shaped late-Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s hair, and a staple of Black beauty culture.
Technique · Chemical texture change

Permanent waving

Changing the shape of hair until it grows out — from hours attached to a heated machine to a cold-wave kit on the kitchen table.
Technique · Temporary setting

Pressing and straightening

Straightening curly and coily hair with a heated comb, and later with chemical relaxers and smoothing treatments — skilled work with a long, contested history.
Technique · Temporary setting

Roller setting

Winding damp hair on rollers and drying it in place — the engine of the weekly "shampoo and set" and of mid-century volume.
1900–1918

Edwardian volume to wartime practicality

Pompadours built over pads and switches under wide hats; electrified salons, Marcel waving and the first permanent-wave machines; and the rise of Black women’s hair-care enterprise.
1919–1929

The bob decade

Shingles, Eton crops and waved bobs; the power of cinema and print; finger waves and the heated permanent-wave machine — and far more variety than the “flapper” image suggests.
1930–1945

Waves, glamour and war

Softer waves and salon permanents; Black beauty culture as work and organising; wartime rolls, scarves and snoods — and the gap between propaganda and the factory floor.
1946–1959

The post-war set

Home perm kits, roller sets and hood dryers; the weekly salon visit; ponytails and the new teenage market; and the migration that reshaped British hair businesses.
1960–1969

Height, geometry and pride

Beehives and bouffants beside precision geometric cuts and long straight hair; the Afro and "Black is Beautiful"; backcombing, rollers, lacquer and wigs.
1970–1979

Shags, feathers and afros

Long centre partings, feathered and shag cuts, Afros and braids, and punk’s bleach and spikes — a decade in which no single look ruled, and none carried a single meaning.
1980–1989

Scale and finish

Big perms and blow-dries, asymmetry and crimping, gel and spikes; New Romantic and goth scenes; Jheri curls, braids and extensions — and the style magazines that recorded them.
1990–1999

Minimal and layered

Cropped and slicked, layered and blow-dried, braided and extended — a decade of session stylists, sitcom haircuts and hair shows, and of sharp arguments over who got credit for braids.
2000–2009

Straightened and extended

Hot plates, clip-ins and side fringes; makeover television and the first hair forums and video channels; smoothing treatments whose risks came to light at the decade’s end; and a global trade in human hair behind the extensions.
2010–2019

The platform era

Tutorials, feeds and influencers; natural-hair communities and the debates they carried; ombré, beach waves and braids; pupils in Britain who challenged school hair rules; and women who stopped dyeing and said so in public.
2020–2026

Pandemic and microtrends

A dated snapshot, not a verdict — salon closures and home haircuts, the Halo Code, and trends that now rise and fall at the speed of a feed.
to c. 500 CE

Plaits, pins and portrait heads

What excavated hair, wigs, combs, pins and portrait sculpture can — and cannot — tell us about women's and girls' hair from Predynastic Egypt to Roman Britain, and which regional histories are still to be commissioned.
1500–1699

Courts, coifs and caps

High hairlines, hair dressed over pads, pearls, false hair and curls in court portraits — beside linen coifs, lice combs and recipe books that hint at how far more women in England and Scotland dealt with their hair between 1500 and 1699.
1700–1789

Powder, pomade and height

Between the 1760s and the 1780s fashionable women in Paris and London had their own hair built up over pads with false hair, pomatum and powder — work done by a new profession of hairdressers, sold through style plates, and mocked in satirical prints that should never be read as photographs.
c. 500–1500

Veils, braids and combs

Covered and uncovered hair in medieval Britain, Ireland and western Europe — combs from early medieval settlements and graves, veils, wimples and nets in manuscripts, girls' loose hair and religious rules — and the myth that every woman covered every strand.
1789–1836

Revolution and Regency

Between the French Revolution and the 1830s, powder and height gave way to crops, classical curls, centre partings, knots and turbans — though “natural-looking” hair still took cutting, curling, pins and often false hair, and locks of hair were set into jewels for love, friendship and mourning.
1837–1900

Loops, nets and fringes

Six decades of changing shapes — smooth centre parts and side loops, netted chignons, false plaits and curled fringes — built with pins, pads and bought hair, some of it harvested from poorer women.
Theme

Grey hair, hair loss and wigs

Greying, thinning, menopause, alopecia, chemotherapy, wigs and head coverings — treated as part of life and choice, not as problems to be fixed.

This list grows as pages are written. If a record is missing, that tells you about our coverage, not about history.