Hair-dressing is no light task; and though a woman may be able to do her own hair, she almost invariably gets it done by somebody else as a great deal has to be done at the back of the head. The professional female hair-dresser is therefore an established institution; she visits most houses at regular intervals. She has usually an assistant, or rather an apprentice, who loosens and combs the hair and prepares it for her to dress. A successful hair-dresser probably makes more money than any other professional of her sex. The geisha’s receipts may be larger, but her expenses are correspondingly great so that her net profit is comparatively small, whereas the hair-dresser needs neither capital nor stock, beyond a few combs, and even these are often unnecessary as she uses those of her client. Besides her regular charges, which are not heavy, she receives many presents from those who are anxious for her to come at regular intervals or out of turn, as when they are going out to a party, a theatre, or some other place of public resort. She is also a great gossip, a disseminator of scandals, and in this respect she has the advantage over the barber who has himself no mean reputation in that direction in Japan as everywhere else; for whereas the barber has to retail his discourse more or less in public before the other clients who are awaiting their turn, the woman purveys her news in the privacy of the lady’s toilet-room. And as the discussion of her neighbour’s private affairs and the tearing of her character is no less a favourite occupation with the Japanese woman than with her European sister, it is not always for the sole purpose of having her hair done that she eagerly waits for the hair-dresser’s visit.
THE HAIR-DRESSER.
Our hair is always black until it begins to turn gray; and women esteem glossy-black, straight hair. Curly hair is held in such horror that it is said to spoil any face however comely in other respects. And the hair-dresser’s apprentice, when she comes to undo her client’s hair for re-dressing, first loosens it and combs it to free it of tangles, and then with a cloth dipped in boiling water, straightens it until all traces of former bends and twists have disappeared, and applies to it a pomade to keep it from curling or getting out of shape. Next to the glossy appearance of the hair, its borders receive careful attention. There should be no clusters of short hairs about the borders, which should show a clear demarcation between the hair and the skin. Hairy borders are regarded to be as great blemishes as clumsy hands and feet. The short hair over the forehead is, however, tolerated as hardly any one is free from it; but at the same time the border over the forehead should rise from either temple in a slight curve until it is right over the forehead when it should meet the other in a faint downward curve. From a fanciful resemblance of such a border to the outline of Mount Fuji, the forehead is then known as the “Fuji forehead,” and highly admired as an important feature of personal beauty.
The Japanese woman does not allow any hair or even down to grow on her face, and from time to time shaves the whole face like the other sex. We are not a hairy race, and our women have on the whole very smooth faces. We hardly ever see them with moustaches or stumps of hairs on their faces. It is not improbable that this shaving of the face contributes to the early loss of complexion among the Japanese women; but the arch-enemy of the clear complexion is certainly the paint, for painting is an almost universal custom in Japan.
Young girls are painted quite white and present a somewhat ghastly appearance, for the paint is a thick paste of white powder, coarser than poudre de riz, and is daubed over the face with the hands. The neck and the upper part of the breast are also painted; but the paint, it must be admitted, is too conspicuous to be mistaken for the natural colour of the skin, and the Japanese girl knows it. If the hair hung over her neck and face in fringes or ringlets, we might suspect her of attempting to pass the paint for her own skin; but the hair is combed up into a knot at the crown and the borders of the hair are strongly marked on the forehead and the neck. As, however, the hair is usually thick over the forehead, the contrast there between the paint and the natural skin may not be striking; but at the back it is impossible to conceal the difference, and as if to make a virtue of necessity, the paint is daubed at the borders in a very angular zigzag, which emphasises the difference between it and the brown skin.
The paint is laid on less thickly as the girl grows up; and though many women, especially those from the country, make a liberal use of it, the custom in Tokyo is to apply a dilute solution lightly so that one can hardly tell at a distance whether the face is painted or not. The neck, however, is more thickly painted. Vermilion is applied to the lips in degrees varying with the age.
The blackening of the teeth is fast going out of fashion; nowadays in Tokyo, only middle-aged women and their seniors take to it, though young married women among the lower classes are sometimes to be seen with blackened teeth. In ancient times men of rank and position blackened their teeth; it was a sign of good birth, and the expression “white teeth” was synonymous with plebeianism. This custom was subsequently confined to court nobles, and was later still adopted by married women. The idea seems to be that as black is the only colour that remains unchanged, the teeth were blackened in token of their owner’s constancy and fidelity.
The eyebrows are shaven in infants and little children, especially girls, with the object of making them grow thick. Women touch them up with Indian ink or burnt-cork powder. They used to shave them off upon marriage at the same time as the first blackening of the teeth; but this custom is, like the other, dying out. Many women, however, shave off their eyebrows when they reach the age of forty or thereabouts, as they prefer to have none at all to having them thin and irregular.
Before they commence their toilet, women take a bath or wash their faces, necks, and shoulders over a tub unless it is early morning in cold weather. Soap is a foreign innovation; and the same purpose was served by the use of fine bran powder obtained by sifting rice after its final cleaning in a mortar. A handful of this powder is put into a little cloth bag, which is then wetted and rubbed against the skin; and the turbid water which exudes through the texture of the bag is very efficacious in cleaning the skin. It is now used together with soap. Young women sometimes put other substances with the bran into the bag, such as pulverised egg-shells which are said to remove stains from the skin and the powered bark of a species of magnolia.