According to Diderot’s Encyclopedia, hair from regions such as Flanders, where beer and cider were the common beverages, made superior wigs; women’s hair was better than men’s; country women’s better than city women’s; and chestnut was the most desirable color—except that white wigs should be made of hair that once had been black. Furthermore, avowed the same authority, “In general the hair of persons not given to excesses lasts a long time, while that of men who live in sexual debauchery, or of women who give themselves to the uses of men, has less sap, dries out, and loses its quality.”
If colonial wigmakers were aware of this dictum—which seems unlikely—they paid it no attention, buying hair from abroad with never a query as to the personal habits of the original wearers, and showing similar indifference in purchasing local locks:
THE subscriber proposes purchasing Hair for Wigs, and hopes he will soon be able to supply wigmakers with that article, of different kinds. He is in want of a quantity of human hair, both long and short, of any colour, for which he will give one shilling per ounce, or more, according to the quality. Apply to Mr. James Nichols, barber in Williamsburg, who will receive it and pay the money, or to me in Petersburg.
George Long.
COLONIAL CLIENTELE
A few of the Williamsburg barbers and perukemakers advertised their readiness to dress ladies’ hair, and Charlton regularly made “curls” for his customers’ wives. But most seem to have confined themselves wholly—or almost so—to barbering and bewigging male clients.
These clients were either town dwellers or members of the plantation gentry, who were the colony’s economic, political, and social elite. Of every hundred Virginians, eighty or more were small farmers or farm workers and did not own wigs. Devereaux Jarratt, the son of a poor but industrious farmer near Williamsburg, recalled later in life in his memoirs:
A periwig, in those days, was a distinguishing badge of gentle folk—and when I saw a man riding the road, near our house, with a wig on, it would so alarm my fears, and give me such a disagreeable feeling, that, I dare say, I would run off, as for my life.
Some of the tools and equipment of the barber-wigmaker, especially those used for shaving and hair dressing. Note in particular the powdering masks in the lower right corner that covered the faces of customers while their hair or wigs were being dusted with powder. DIDEROT
And an anonymous traveler of the 1740s observed that in Maryland: