Explore
Choose a period, an age, a technique or a theme and see which styles, tools, people and ideas cross.
Every record on the site is listed below. Filters narrow the list; without them you see everything. The site is still growing, so if nothing matches, that tells you about our coverage so far, not about the past.
to c. 500 CE
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.
c. 500–1500
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.
1500–1699
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
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.
1789–1836
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
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.
1900–1918
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
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
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
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
Beehives and bouffants beside precision geometric cuts and long straight hair; the Afro and "Black is Beautiful"; backcombing, rollers, lacquer and wigs.
1970–1979
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Style · Braided, twisted or locked
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 · Braided, twisted or locked
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
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
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
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 · Dressed style
Hair gathered, coiled and pinned — a form that has meant imperial elegance, respectable adulthood, workplace safety and, lately, deliberate messiness.
Style · Dressed style
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 · Dressed style
Hair rolled high at the front and pinned — the style most people now picture for the 1940s, and one of the most revived.
Style · Addition or covering
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
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.
Technique · Temporary setting
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
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
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
Winding damp hair on rollers and drying it in place — the engine of the weekly "shampoo and set" and of mid-century volume.
Object · c. 1575 BCE to present
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 · Prehistoric to present
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 · 1880s to present in British collections
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 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
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.
1869 or 1877 – 1957
Founder of the Poro hair-care company and its training network — a pioneer of Black women’s enterprise often overshadowed in popular memory.
1884–1976
Antoni Cierplikowski, a Polish-born hairdresser who became “Antoine” of Paris — a celebrity salon owner long credited with the first fashionable ladies’ bob, a claim still without contemporary proof.
c. 1920–2003
Ohio cosmetologist who patented a method of weaving added hair onto a client's own hair in 1952, called it the Hair-Weev, and spent four decades teaching it — a founder of modern sewn-in weaving, not the inventor of added hair.
1930–2014
Nigerian photographer whose Hairstyles series, begun in 1968, is one of the richest visual records of women’s hair in any country — made in the years after independence from British rule, and now held in London as well as Paris and New York.
1872–1951
The Black Forest-born hairdresser who, trading in London as “Charles Nestlé”, patented a heated permanent-waving process in 1909 — then rebuilt his business in New York after wartime internment.
1938–2023
Harlem photographer whose pictures of the Grandassa Models and the “Naturally” fashion shows made natural hair a visible ideal of beauty in the early 1960s, and whose images reached Black publications in Britain at the time.
1867–1919
Sarah Breedlove built an influential hair-care company and training network — but she did not invent the hot comb.
1852–1936
The Paris hairdresser whose name became the Marcel wave — a heated-iron wave worn for half a century. The technique’s fame is well documented; much of his life, and the patents often credited to him, are not.
1896–1994
Beautician, teacher and Walker company executive who patented a permanent-waving machine in 1928 and spent half a century training hairdressers — and organising them.
1912?–2008
Harlem beautician and entrepreneur whose Rose Meta House of Beauty was described as the largest Black beauty salon in the world, and who helped found a Black-owned bank in Harlem.
1928–2012
London hairdresser whose precision, geometric cutting made the cut itself the style in the 1960s — and, for some clients, replaced the weekly shampoo and set with a cut every few weeks.
Theme
Hair as identity, family, artistry and enterprise — and as a target of racialised rules — told without reducing it to struggle alone.
Theme
Greying, thinning, menopause, alopecia, chemotherapy, wigs and head coverings — treated as part of life and choice, not as problems to be fixed.
Theme
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.
Nothing on the site matches all of these strands yet.
