The Boston Gazette had, in 1771, a ludicrous description of an accident to a young woman in the streets of that town. In an infaust moment she was thrown down by a runaway, and her tower received serious damage. It burst its thin outer wall of natural hair, and disgorged cotton and wool and tow stuffing, false hair, loops of ribbon and gauze. Ill-bred boys kicked off portions of the various excrescences, and the tower-wearer was jeered at until she was glad to escape with her own few natural locks.
A New England clergyman—Manasseh Cutler—wrote thus of the head-dress of Mrs. General Knox in 1787:
"Her hair in front is craped at least a foot high much in the form of a churn bottom upward and topped off with a wire skeleton in the same form covered with black gauze which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is in a large braid turned up and confined with a monstrous large crooked comb. She reminded me of the monstrous cap worn by the Marquis of La Fayettes valet, commonly called on this account the Marquises devil."
Hair so elaborately arranged could not be dressed daily. Once a week was frequently thought sufficient; and some very disgusting accounts are given of methods to dress the hair so it would "keep safely" for a month. The Abbé Robin wrote of New England women in 1781:
"The hair of the head is raised and supported upon cushions to an extravagant height somewhat resembling the manner in which the French ladies wore their hair some years ago. Instead of powdering they often wash the head, which answers the purpose well enough as their own hair is commonly of an agreeable light color, but the more fashionable among them begin to adopt the European fashion of setting off the head to the best advantage."
The fashion of the roll was of much importance, and various shaped rolls were advertised; we find one of "a modish new roll weighing but 8 ounces when others weigh fourteen ounces." We can well believe that such a heavy roll made poor Anna Winslow's head "ach and itch like anything." A Salem hair-dresser, who employed twelve barbers, advertised thus in 1773: "Ladies shall be attended to in the polite constructions of rolls such as may tend to raise their heads to any pitch they desire."
The grotesqueness of such adornment found frequent ridicule in prose and verse. One poet sang:
"Give Chloe a bushel of horsehair and wool,
Of paste and pomatum a pound,
Ten yards of gay ribbon to deck her sweet skull
And gauze to encompass it round.
"Of all the gay colours the rainbow displays
Be those ribbons which hang on her head,
Be her flowers adapted to make the folks gaze,
And about the whole work be they spread.
"Let her flaps fly behind for a yard at the least,
Let her curls meet just under her chin,
Let those curls be supported to keep up the list,
With an hundred instead of one pin."
We can easily see that after such rough treatment the hair needed restoring waters; and indeed from earliest times hair-restorers and hair-dyes did these "vain ancients" use. "Women with juice of herbs gray locks disguised." In these days of manifold mysterious nostrums that gild the head of declining age and make glad the waste places on bald young masculine pates, let us read the simple receipts of the good old times: