Wigs

So I was reading an interesting web page yesterday about the history of hair styles going back to ancient history up to the present because I wanted to know more information about what was going on around the baroque time when all these people had amazing, long, curly hair.

It turns out that a lot of the people were wearing wigs and apparently French King Louis XII or XIII popularized it. He apparently went bald at an early age. People wore wigs made from human hair or horse hair, and they were powdered to make them white.

I have to say it’s kind of disappointing to know this. I thought people were just letting their hair grow and that back then there must have been a lot of people with hair similar to mine.

If it was wigs made from human hair that they were wearing then some people must have had hair like that but I really don’t like the idea that some people would have literally sold their hair to rich people to get money.

I was thinking about all this this evening because I was trimming my hair. Some of the ends were pretty damaged. I remember a long time ago someone posted on a hair forum a microscope image of her damaged hair ends where you could really see how damaged they were. I know that mine must have been similar. They were getting beyond the point were any type of conditioner or repair treatment could help.

The actual amount of hair I trimmed was actually only slight, but because it was damaged hair it has had a noticeable positive effect on the appearance and – more importantly – the condition of my hair. No more really bad knotted ends. It drives me crazy when I would check my hair every day by running my fingers through it and find dreadlocks forming and have to meticulously detangle them. After multiple consecutive days of this kind of thing I decided enough was enough.

While my hair type is similar to the baroque style of flowing curly hair, my hair is not as long as you see in old baroque paintings. But – having lived all my life with my hair – I like this shorter style. I think it looks good. When it’s a little shorter like this it has more lift. And it’s a lot less of a hassle to deal with.

I try to think how my ancestors thousands of years ago who had hair like mine would have kept their hair and I like to imagine that it would have been similar to how I keep it now and for similar reasons.

Sometimes you’ll see these really crappy “history” shows with extremely crappy, second-rate acting where they are trying to depict ancient people and they often have matted or dreadlocked hair. They always want to think that we now are so much more together and advanced than people back then but I think that’s bullshit. There’s absolutely no reason that people during what is called the “stone age” were not as civilized or more civilized than present humans.

One last thought about the baroque wig fashion – if people were wearing wigs to look like that then the type of hair that I have must have been what people wanted. And so who were the people that they saw and whose hair they were emulating? Those people were my ancestors.

My ancestors must have been intense people if so many people wanted to copy the look of their hair. I like to think that my ancestors were the most advanced people living in their societies.