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Ancient Roman Women Hairdressing

by Eugenia Salza Prina Ricotti

The beauty: the hair.
Roman women were not only lively and intelligent but they were also refined and not only had they all the means to cure their beauty, but, if nature had not been generous with them, they could even do something about it.. As a matter of fact the “Matronae” owned slaves expert in massages and other ones masters of hairdressing., special servants who knew how to elegantly arrange their hair and tress them in the best coiffure in fashion at the times. It is also true that some time, thinking to better their aspects, the ladies subjected their hair to ruinous treatments which heavily damaged them, and Ovid, the women friend and their most sage adviser, puts them on guards against dyeing them. To became blond was at least imprudent, and the lady that tried to rival the northern women’s tresses very soon had to bitterly regret her fancy. The concoctions used were not safe and Ovid, shows to us a tragic example which hit him directly because it involved his beautiful girl friend. Ovid had warned her but she would not heed him and now the only thing that Ovid could do was to lament her folly:
“I told you so “don’t dye your hair”. Now you don’t have any hair left to dye. But, if you had left them as they were, not one would have hair as long as yours. And what could we say about the fact that they were so thin that the hairdresser hardly dared to curl them. They were as thin as the dark skinned Seri’s dresses, and they were tenuous as the threads created by the spider’s frail foot who spun its web under an abandoned beam”
Of course not all the Roman women had beautiful hair as Corinna’s soft hazelnut lighted by golden reflexes ones, hair so easy to comb that the hairdresser never had any difficulty in doing them and thus she was never lashed by a displeased and out of patience mistress. Of course many were the women so endowed and with splendid hair, beautiful also in the morning they woke up an laid in their bed enveloped by this soft and perfumed mantle. Hair naturally wavy as the one that Corinna tortured with iron and fire to transform her waves in curls, and uselessly the angry poet yelled:
“It is a crime, a crime to burn this hair!”
And he was right. As a matter of fact the girl lost her hair and she was obliged to find a remedy in a wig. The only good thing in her mishap was that now she could be blonder than a summer corn field and, as the poet told her,
“Now Germany will send you the hair of those women who had be captured”
As a matter of fact in the Augustan period with all the transalpine conquests that had been won came the fashion to made wigs with the Sigambri women’s hair. In the second half of the I cent. B.C. blond hair were the “dernier cri”, and the Roman women remedied their natural dark one either with blond and curled wigs, or dyeing their own with the “spuma batava” or more simply and even more costly spraying their coiffures with a lot of powdered gold.
But now let’s have a look at the different way to comb one’s hair. Not all the women wore them in the same way. Each one of them picked her choice among the ones that were better adapted to their faces. The elegant lady knew what to chose and the ones that did not know how relied in the experts of the sector, One of them was of course Ovid who dictated:
Long face - comb the hair by parting them.
Round face – better a hairdressing “alla Livia” with uncovered ears and a shock of hair brought to the font.
There were also other ways to do them and it is always Ovid who give a list.
Lose and blowed up
Pulled tight.
Held by a turtle comb
Waved
Arty disheveled.
To obtain all these form of hairdressing the ladies were obliged to long and absorbing session before a spyglass while the hairdresser arranged their mass of curls. Due to the complication of those arrangements the sittings were long and boring, but, from what we read, we learn that they can do it while receiving visitors and with them they spent pleasurably the time.
For what Ovid suggests there was no objection to be combed in presence of her lover if the man came to visit her. But the poet added laughing that if a woman did not have beautiful hair, the only place where she could be combed was the “Dea Bona”’s temple, a place where no man could ever enter. Apart of this when the lady wore a wig it was absolutely inadvisable to receive men, and the poet tells about once when he entered his girlfriend’s house she tried to put her wig in a haste and set it with its back on her front. This amused a lot the poet but absolutely not his mistress.
To conclude what has been said if it was admitted that a lady could be surrounded by her suitors during the combing of her hair, she had also to be sure never to lose her calm and composure. Ovid sustained that in the presence of third parties to scratch, beat, torture and torn the hairdresser’s dresses was considered absolutely bad taste. Kind of scenes of this kind are also reported by Juvenal and he explained that they happened every time the lady blamed the poor slave of what was only due to her own appearance. However from what we are just reading it is clear that the hairdressers’ life must have been quite hard.