School-age girls

School-age girls’ hair sits between family and institution. At home it might be plaited by a parent before school or washed on a weekly wash day; at school it met written rules about length, tying back and “extreme” styles. Those rules have fallen unequally on girls with Afro-textured hair and on those who cover their hair for faith or wear wigs for medical reasons.

Questions we ask

Who did the girl’s hair before school, and when did she take it over?
What did school rules say — and how were they actually enforced?
How did sport, lice control and practicality shape choices?

Problems with the evidence

School rules overrepresent authority.
Children’s own views survive unevenly.

Styles, techniques and themes for this age

Object · Prehistoric to present

The comb

The most ordinary hair tool, and one of the most revealing — from ancient carved combs to celluloid dressing-table sets, wide-toothed picks and heated pressing combs.
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.
Source guide

Reading hair in family photographs

How to use hair to help date a family photograph — and why hair alone can mislead.
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 · 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

The ponytail

Hair gathered and tied at the back of the head — practical for school and sport, a symbol of 1950s teenagers, and a style whose tightness matters.
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 · 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.
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.
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.
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

Hair and school

Plaits before the bell, rules about length and "extreme" styles, and whose natural hair has been treated as a problem — from written rules to how they were enforced.

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