From Cup to Curl: How to Get Fabulous Historical Hair Using Straws

Big Hair was a Big Deal Long Before Dallas and Dolly Parton!

Those of you that browse my rambling frequently are well aware that I am hair illiterate. Indeed, I know next to nothing about taming my crispy, unruly mane. Yet, I am slowly teaching myself a few tricks here and there, and the internet has been a boon for my boring locks.

As a strong adherent to the old cliche that “every curly-haired girl wants straight hair and every straight-haired girl wants curls,” I have dreamed of lovely curls since childhood. When I was very young, my mother had tightly permed 1980s poodle hair (her words, not mine!), and I remember playing with her pink plastic hair pick, pretending I had a perm that needed fluffing, too. I am infinitely envious of those glamorous 1980s superstars like Bernadette Peters and Whitney Houston who had curls so luscious no scrunchie could contain them! A perm is still on my wish list (even though everyone who survived the 80s or who has naturally curly hair tries their best to talk me out of it).

Besides wanting crazy amounts of day-to-day curls, my historical costuming adventures have reenforced just how important curls have been throughout the ages. The 1980s do not hold the monopoly on excessive amounts of curl! Indeed, many eras require spiral curls to achieve the right look:

An Unknown Nobelwoman painted by the wonderful Jacob Ferdinand Voet modelling a 1670s hairstyle.

This lovely Portrait of a Lady by François Henri Mulard displays the shorter spiral curls popular during the Regency era.

This mid-19th century teenage girl has possibly the most enviable set of sausage curls in the history of mankind! I found her photo (and the one below) while I was researching Victorian haircare and have been obsessed ever since!

This unknown beauty from the 1870s perfectly demonstrates the decade’s fashion for intricately curled and mounded hair.

Other eras benefit from the volume brushed-out curls can give, especially late 18th century and early 20th century hairstyles:

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, late 18th century, demonstrating the infamous “hedgehog” hairstyle.

Miss Carlyle and Miss Clarke enjoy tea Gibson Girl style while attempting to balance the hair piled fashionably high on their foreheads.

Many of these looks were achieved through wigs and hair extensions. Buying and selling human hair has been big business for centuries and one of the greatest criticisms of hair fashions was the fact that many styles often meant that the majority of the hair on a woman’s head was not her own, but that of a complete stranger! Much of the hair used to make switches and wigs came from peasant girls in rural areas, so a princess might literally have the hair of a pauper.

Fancy hairstyles and the hair switches required to complete them, circa 1867

 Unless you are lucky enough to be gifted by nature with thick, voluminous locks, hairpieces, rats, rolls, and wigs are all part of a modern historical costumer’s hair arsenal. There are plenty of awesome tutorials with tricks to boost the volume of your natural hair with socks and hair rats or make yourself a completely new hairdo using a wig. Jen of Festive Attyre always has beautiful big Georgian hair thanks to a combination of curling her own hair and adding in a hairpiece:

 I can barely handle my own hair, so rats and hairpieces escape me and wigs are a whole ‘nother beast entirely. I do have a squishy net doughnut that I use to help me make buns, but otherwise, I have very few hair-boosting tools (indeed, I didn’t have a hairdryer until my sister bought me one for my birthday this year). My go-to to get the volume I crave has long been braiding. I used a single braid to get fluffy 1890s “New Woman” hair:

How to Get No-Fuss Fluff for the New Woman

I have been known to wander around the apartment complex looking like this:

To get to 1890s/1980s worthy fluff, you must first re-live the 1990s.

If I braid my whole head like this, I am rewarded with glorious poofy hair that looks like it was crimped:

Enjoying the irony as Mother Nature wearing faux foliage in the middle of a Taco Bell.

However, it’s not curls. I’d attempted pin curls a few times over the years, but I never got them to work satisfactorily, so for Georgian Picnic this year, I decided to try something new. I had been stumbling around Pinterest as one is wont to do at 3am when I started seeing all these pins about straw curlers and the photos made my jaw drop:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA! SO GORGEOUS!

Most the the tutorials I found were for African American hair and I worried that my pale, limp locks wouldn’t be able to support the curls thanks to their lack of texture, but I decided to try it anyway. Anything for those spirals!

I found this tutorial and when I saw the curls she got at 6:06, I freaked out!
CURLS! SAUSAGE CURLS! JUST LIKE 1860s GIRL’S SAUSAGE CURLS!

 I think I would have fallen out of the chair if there wasn’t a cat in my lap digging her claws into my thigh for dear life. The day before Georgian Picnic, I bought a cheap pack of 100 straws for about $1.50 at Walmart and commenced experimenting. I was aiming for a hairstyle like this:

Portrait of Jane Horley by Rolinda Sharples, circa 1815-20

So I separated the front half of my hair and curled it, leaving the back uncurled (I put it up in a bun). I didn’t use any products in my hair before, during, or after. I did have slightly damp hair when I began.

My hair in its natural state.

I bent the straws and held them in place with bobbie pins, murdering quite a few in the process. Long metal hair clips would probably work better. You might even have some and not know it! Check your sewing kit. Fabric clips and hair clips are quite similar.

I will admit that I had a little trouble rolling the hair onto the straws. Most of that just springs from my inability to roll hair (hence why curlers, pin curls, and any other type of curl had thus far been unattainable). I rolled my hair over itself instead of all along the straw like in the video. This worked for my purposes in the end, however, because Regency curls are short anyway.

I slept on my straw-filled hair, but as I would later find out, the straws work their magic in only a few hours. When I took out all the straws, this is what I ended up with:

My hair is much longer in front than a Regency woman’s would have been, so my curls hang lower than most portraits show.

After phutzing with the ringlets a bit.

This is the hair I attended Georgian Picnic with. Since it was my first attempt, it was a bit messy, but it did suit the romantic aura of the era pretty well.

Photo courtesy of Festive Attyre

When I got home, I separated the ringlets with my fingers just to see what they looked like looser and I was rewarded with light, fluffy, fairly natural-looking curls:

I lost about 1/2 of my hair’s length to the curls, mostly due to the way I wrapped them around the straws. If you wrap the hair more evenly over the straws, you won’t lose as much length.

The curls had good volume and made a nice Gibson Girl pouf pretty easy. I wish I’d taken a photo! Since I’d gone this far, might as well go the extra mile and brush everything out!

Helloooooooooo giant hair of my dreams!

I’m only a few hairpins, some hair powder, and one fabulous hat away from this:

Portrait of Catherine Clemens by George Romney, circa 1788

I am so excited to have finally found a curling method that works for my hair! The curls held well until I had to wash my hair the next day, so they are perfect for long events. They survived wind, rain, and my hat in great condition. I tried them a second time for my dress photoshoot and only left the straws in my hair for about two hours. The final curls were a bit looser, but still held up to outdoor photography. Plus, I’d gotten a bit better at winding the hair around the straws, so the results were much smoother:

I also did fewer curls to save time and ended up liking the look much better.

So  my straw curler experiment was a complete success! There are skinny wired-foam curlers that work similarly, but I never got them to work as well as these good ol’ Wally World drinking straws– a cheap and effective solution!

The Myth of a Myth: Brushing Your Hair 100 Times

A Tiny Bit of Historical Hair Care for the Modern Woman

Young Teenage Girl with Sausage Curls, circa 1860

I have very greasy hair and always have. It’s also fine, but dry at the ends, so I have to cleanse it every day yet hydrate it with heavy creams. Recently, I’ve delved into the world of alternative haircare. In my case, I’ve taken up co-washing, which uses conditioner as a “shampoo” that doesn’t strip hair as badly as regular shampoo. It’s basically alternative hair care for casuals, but so far, it’s been working pretty well! A lot of alternative haircare methods remind me a lot of pre-20th century haircare methods. Before the great hygiene shift created by 20th century marketing, women didn’t just style their hair differently than we do; they cared for their hair differently, too.

Lotta Crabtree, an American Actress
One of her defining physical features was her thick, somewhat unruly hair.

They used pomatums, powders, and oils frequently, but loathed to use soap on their hair because it is very drying and disrupts the natural system of oils in your hair, kind of a “hard-reset” for your scalp. In fact, soap was considered a last resort for only the most dirty of hair situations. If they were putting all that stuff on their locks and never using soap, they must have been pretty disgusting, right? Not necessarily.

Group of Young Ladies, circa 1870

I love this photo because it shows a variety of hair types, textures, and colors.

Remember that old tidbit about brushing your hair 100 strokes or so before bed each night? Everyone these days brushes it off (ha ha!) as a myth and screams that the 100 stroke method is horrid for you hair, causing split ends, flyaways, and even baldness! And they are right…but oh so very wrong.

You see, such claims are for women who wash their hair frequently with modern shampoos and use plastic brushes to detangle their hair. If you brush your modern-treated hair vigorously with one of those brushes, it will create static and lead to snarls and frazzed locks. But those that claim the 100 strokes is an outdated practice are ignoring the fact that many modern women have begun to go shampoo-free, just like our ancestors! How do they do it without their hair being weighted down with all that oil and gunk?

Natural Bristle Hair Brush from a Vanity Set, circa 1695

Natural Bristle Brush with Silver Handle, circa 1900

Modern Soft Boar Bristle Brush by Kent

Before plastic brushes became the norm, all brushes were natural-bristle brushes. A woman’s vanity set would include one or two combs to take the tangles out of her hair, then a natural bristle brush to style and tame it. A bristle brush is not a detangler. It distributes the oils throughout your hair that would otherwise accumulate at the roots, smooths flyways, and cleans the dirt out of your hair.

“Aurelia (Fazio’s Mistress)” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, circa 1863-73

Unlike some of the modern “myth-busting” pages that recommend a sparse bristle brush, you actually want the opposite. A brush with a wide, dense pad of soft-to-medium bristles is much better for your hair than the tight, stiff clumps on many modern brushes, but it doesn’t have to be as expensive as the uber-deluxe Kent brush above. I have a wood-handle, oval paddle brush from Conair that I got for $6 at Walgreens that works really well. Baby hair brushes are also a good choice if you have thin or brittle hair since the fibers are often softer than regular boar bristle (just make sure they are natural fiber and not plastic). You start at the roots and in long strokes, pull the brush down the hair shaft. It really does make your hair silky smooth, but it takes time, especially if you have long hair! 100 brush strokes is actually too few in some cases!

I’ve started using my boar bristle brush on the days that I don’t wash my hair. I wake up an oily mess, but with 3 minutes of brushing in the morning and at night, it does it get very soft and the hair becomes slick, but not greasy.

“Princess Alexandra of Denmark” (later Queen Alexandra of England), circa 1861

A lot of historical hairstyles that would otherwise require lots of holding sprays or tight curls, like 18th century pompadours, 1830s sculpted buns, and 1870s updos, are easier to achieve with natural-state hair. Brushing your hair with a boar bristle brush also changes how your hair behaves. In many of the photographs of Victorian women with long hair, you’ll notice that it’s lightly wavy and feathers as it near the ends. In the modern world, we call this the dreaded tent hair! But healthy, long hair naturally takes this shape if properly cared for. It looks dry to us, but that’s because we are used to applying heavy (often silicone based) conditioners on the ends while having stripped hair at the scalp. Our ancestors had the opposite situation: natural oils near the base that lessened down the shaft towards the ends.

Portrait of a Woman with her Hair Down, circa 1880

In fact, daily shampooings are relatively new. Up until the 1960s, women would wash their hair only once week or so. Here’s a fabulous hair care video from the 50s demonstrating proper hair care for the era, including “frequent washing,” which in this case means every two weeks!

I’m still technically in the transition phase during the process, so my hair gets oily, but I can tell my hair’s developing texture is much different from my previous one. It looks much less like a Pantene ad and more like Victorian hair– smooth and close-laying on top and feathered at the ends. Thanks to over a century of being conditioned (ha!) to think that natural body oils are bad for us and that our hair should fluff four inches high on our scalp, it’s hard to trade that squeaky, perky clean for your hair’s natural character. Of course, results are not instant. First, your scalp has to adjust to not being super-stripped, so it will be enormously greasy for the first few weeks.

After your hair and scalp adjust to the new regimen, you may find out that your hair is entirely different than you’re familiar with! Sadly, it will probably not give you magical curls or volume if you naturally don’t posses those features, but people who fully embrace the historical or no-product haircare lifestyle report that their hair grows faster and doesn’t suffer as much breakage as before. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully let go of my shampoo and conditioning ways, but for now, it’s fun experiment!

Portrait of a Woman, circa 1870

Victorian ladies did not have access to hairspray, but they did use styling oils, waxes, and creams to help hold their hair in place if the natural sebum in their hair was not enough. They also had access to chemical treatments, but many ladies dared to risk them, especially since cosmetics were not as heavily regulated as they are today and could be quite harsh. Curling irons, however, were nearly universal and were heated near the stove or a lamp. You have to be really careful not to burn your hair with one!

Anyway, my point is that the 100 brush-stroke myth is not a myth. It just requires a specific tool as a caveat. A boar bristle brush is good to have for any occasion, not just for ladies who dream of floor-length locks! It’s one of the simplest additions to a any hair care kit and comes in handy for regular small jobs like smoothing back hair for a sleek ponytail or getting a little natural loft in your roots. Everyone’s hair is different, so what hair care methods work for one person may not work well for others. Fortunately, there are lots of different ways to care for you hair, and there is no right or wrong–only what works for you. Even if you still use regular shampoo and conditioner, using a boar bristle brush on your “off” hair-washing days works wonders!

 If you are interested in no shampoo/product haircare, there are lots of blogs, videos, and tutorials to help you, for example Tara Creel (who has hair similar to mine) has a full series on YouTube about her 1 year without shampoo journey. There are also plenty of blogs about historical haircare and cosmetics, like On Living History’s series about 18th century hair products and styling.