Category: Hair

Lacquered puffiness, usually  on top of the head  but  sometimes also on the sides, to increase the hair’s height and volume  characterizes the bouffant hairstyle. The hairstyle’s  name  comes  from  the  French verb  bouffer, meaning to puff out  or to swell. An urban legend, known to folklorists as “The  Fatal Hairdo” or “The  Spider in…

An ear-length blunt cut,  worn  with  or without bangs,  the  bob  became a widely popular hairstyle for women during the 1920s. Associated with the young  women known as flappers,  the bob became a visual metaphor for the social changes taking place  during this  period. Prior  to the  1920s,  a woman’s hair  was considered her  crowning…

Whether or not  blondes have  more  fun,  blondeness has  been  a crucial  component in  the  hair  care  industry, the  world  of fashion, and  popular imagination. While  blondeness has for centuries been  associated in art and  literature with the fairer  sex, and  thus  inextricably bound to all the  race  and  cultural implications that have long privileged…

Throughout different periods in Western history, men  and women have both embraced  what today is considered to be androgynous fashion. Prior to the Industrial Revolution and before  the decline  of the aristocracy in the late 18th  century, aristocratic men  indulged in cosmetics, preferred perfectly coifed hair and powdered wigs,  and adorned themselves in lace, velvets,…

The  Afro is a hairstyle that  was popularized by African  Americans in  the  late 1960s  and  1970s,  and  signaled  racial  pride  and  the  embrace of a new  aesthetic. Characterized by stretching tightly coiled  or kinky hair into  a large round crown, the  Afro is one  of the  most  recognizable hairstyles in American culture. Alternately  heralded…