Then, henceforth, let no maid nor matron grieve,
To see her locks of an unlovely hue,
Grizzled or thin, for liberal art shall give
Such piles of curls as nature never knew.
Eve, with her veil of tresses, at the sight
Had blushed, outdone, and owned herself a fright.”
When long-curled perriwigs were in fashion, some fine heads of hair fetched extraordinary prices; and as it was impossible to find human hair in sufficient quantity for the purposes of trade, recourse was had to horse-hair. One of the companies projected just before the bursting of the South Sea bubble, was a company for dealing in human hair which promised unheard of profits. In “A Description of Trades,” published 1747, we are told, “that the business of hair-curlers and sellers is properly a part of perriwig making, but of late years they have prevailed so much as to become quite a separate trade, and really not an inconsiderable one neither, some of them being even styled merchants, who have the makers-up of hair in all shapes for their customers. There are also abundance of hawkers and pedlars who go up and down the country to buy up this commodity, who generally dispose of it to these hair-sellers.” The material for a perriwig being somewhat costly, and trickery not uncommon, the character of the barber was the best guarantee for the quality of the wig. The reader has probably heard how Tom Brown, meeting a parson at Nando’s Coffee-house, recommended him to the honestest perriwig-maker in Christendom—the barber at Chelmsford, with his nineteen daughters, all bred up to his own trade, and being kept unmarried, their hair grew so prodigiously fast that it gave them full employment throughout the year; the barber cropped them every four years, and never lacked a plentiful harvest—so that Chelmsford was as famous for its wigs, as Romford for calves. The girls were all virtuous, which made the hair the stronger, and there was not finer hair to be had in the kingdom. On this, the parson who was in want of a new wig, and had been cheated in his last purchase, set out for Chelmsford, and returned thoroughly satisfied—that he had been sent on a fool’s errand.
The value of long fair hair, when wigs were in fashion, is amusingly shown in Walpole’s anecdote of the Countess of Suffolk, married to Mr. Howard. “Such was their poverty, that having invited some friends to dinner, and being disappointed of a small remittance, she was forced to sell her hair to furnish the entertainment, and for which she obtained twenty pounds.” Middle Row, Holborn, was chiefly inhabited by perriwig-makers, and the French barbers congregated in Soho.
One of the mysteries of the craft was the art of dyeing hair, and every barber was supposed to be fully initiated in this occult science. Greeks and Romans performed similar feats in their day, but blonde hair being most esteemed, the compositions they used were of a very different nature to those employed by the moderns; strictly speaking they could hardly be called dyes, they partook more of the nature of caustic pomades and pigments: such were the pilæ Mattiacæ, the caustica spuma, spuma Battava, &c., of their authors, imported for the most part from Germany. Making old folks young again, at least in appearance, was not beyond the power of Roman art, for the locks of age, white as the plumage of the swan, could be suddenly changed to that of a crow. Sir Thomas Brown suggests that Medea might have possessed some famous dye:—“That Medea, the famous sorceress, could renew youth, and make old men young again, was nothing else but that, from the knowledge of simples, she had a receipt to make white hair black, and reduce old heads into the tincture of youth again.” Mohammed forbade the dyeing of the hair; and a story is told of Herod, that in order to conceal his advanced age, he used secretly to dye his grey locks with a dark pigment In the greater number of Anglo-Saxon M.S.S. the hair and beard are painted blue, and sometimes green and orange. Strutt concluded from this, that the Saxons dyed or tinged their hair in some way; but the point is doubtful. In the fourteenth century, yellow was the favourite colour, and saffron was used as a dye. Again, in Elizabeth’s reign, fair hair became fashionable, and the ladies used various compositions to obtain the desired shade. Stubbes is indignant at the practice, and exclaims with his usual warmth:—“If any have hair of their own natural growing which is not fair enough, then will they dye it in divers colours, almost changing the substance into accidents by their devilish, and worse than these, cursed devices.” Foreign charlatans, quack doctors, and astrologers, were formidable rivals of the barber, and succeeded in disposing of their dyes and cosmetics in the most unblushing manner; some affected to be so occupied in the sublime study of contriving cures for all the ills which flesh is heir to, as to have no leisure for cosmetic practice, and coolly announced that their wives attended to such matters. A high German doctor and astrologer informed the public that he was blessed with a wife “who could make red hair as white as a lily, shape the eyebrows to a miracle, make low foreheads as high as you please, and had a rich water which would make the hair curl.” The practice of shaping the eyebrows, though now in disuse, was at one time considered a very delicate and important operation. Every one has remarked the extreme fineness of the eyebrows in the pictures of the great Italian masters. The St. Catherine of Rafaelle, and the Saints of Francia, in the National Gallery, are instances of this; such was the fashion of the Italian ladies of the fifteenth century, and was esteemed a great beauty. The eyebrows were carefully reduced in substance to a mere line, till scarcely visible. A lady, whose lover had an unconquerable aversion to red hair, once made application to a noted quack, who, politely answered:—“This is no business of mine, but my wife’s, who’ll soon redress your grievances, and furnish you with a leaden comb and my Anti-Erythrœan Unguent, which after two or three applications will make you as fair or as brown as you desire.” We hope, for the ladies sake, it turned out to be the true Elisir d’amore. A Mr. Michon, a goldsmith, in 1710, advertised a clear fluid, which would change red or grey hair to brown or black, under the name of “The Tricosian Fluid.” The remarkable success which attended the use of the Cyananthropopoion, patronized by Titmouse Tittlebat, is known to all readers of “Ten Thousand a Year.” It would, however, say but little for the progress of chemistry in our day, if we were unprovided with some efficient means of dyeing the hair; in competent hands, no doubt, the thing is easy enough. The old-fashioned dyes are now perfectly useless, and may safely be consigned to the same limbo with Peter Pindar’s razors:
“Sir,” quoth the razor man, “I’m not a knave;