Six women side by side, each from a different era and each with a different hairstyle. From left: a straight black braided wig with a blunt fringe, beaded braid ends and a gold cobra circlet, against ancient temple columns; auburn hair swept up into a bun and bound with a band of pearls; a towering powdered pouf dressed with feathers and silk roses; a full, rounded Afro worn with large gold hoops; tousled blonde hair pulled into a high messy bun with a scrunchie; and sleek black hair in a high bun with loose strands framing the face, in front of a city skyline.

A cultural history · antiquity to today

Women’s and Girls’ Hair

How women and girls have cut, dressed, covered, coloured, curled, straightened, braided and protected their hair — and what those choices meant at every age.

Start here Explore the timeline

Hair is both fibre and language: shaped by tools and chemistry, but read through culture.The working proposition of this site

This is not a gallery of “hairstyles by decade”. We look at what people actually wore as well as elite ideals; at girls, teenagers, midlife and older women, not only fashionable young adults; at every hair texture; and at the skilled work — at home and in the salon — behind every style. Every claim is sourced, and we mark what is still being checked.

Independent: not sponsored by any brand, salon or professional body.

Four ways in

By period

From ancient wigs to pandemic haircuts, in 17 overlapping periods.
By age

First haircuts, school plaits, teenage experiments, midlife rules and grey hair.
By style

Bobs, braids, buns and afros — each traced across centuries and communities.
How was it made?

From finished style back to the tools, time and hands that made it.

A history in 17 periods

Full timeline

Styles coexisted, spread unevenly and were revived again and again. These periods are a map for research, not a single line of progress.

Style biographies

All styles

Style · Braided, twisted or locked

Braids and plaits

One of the oldest ways of dressing hair — and not one style but many, from a school plait tied with a ribbon to cornrows, box braids and ancient braided wigs.
Style · Braided, twisted or locked

Locs

Rope-like strands formed as hair is allowed or encouraged to mat — worn across many cultures and faiths, and still penalised by some school and workplace rules.
Style · Dressed style

The Afro

Coily hair worn in its own texture and shaped into a rounded form — a powerful image of pride and politics, and also a style people wore for many other reasons.
Style · Dressed style

The beehive

A tall, rounded dome of backcombed hair — one of the few styles with a named, dated creator, and a lesson in how a magazine commission could become a decade’s silhouette.
Style · Cut

The bob

A family of short cuts whose meanings kept changing — from a 1920s statement to 1960s geometry to a style so familiar it now barely registers.
Style · Dressed style

The bun and chignon

Hair gathered, coiled and pinned — a form that has meant imperial elegance, respectable adulthood, workplace safety and, lately, deliberate messiness.
Style · Dressed style

The ponytail

Hair gathered and tied at the back of the head — practical for school and sport, a symbol of 1950s teenagers, and a style whose tightness matters.
Style · Dressed style

Victory rolls

Hair rolled high at the front and pinned — the style most people now picture for the 1940s, and one of the most revived.
Style · Addition or covering

Wigs and hairpieces

Added hair is part of hair culture, not "fake hair" — from ancient plaited wigs to Victorian switches, 1960s fashion wigs, extensions and wigs worn through illness.

Essays

All essays

Essay

Age and hair

Who decides how a girl’s hair is worn, when that power passes to her, and what happens to it again in old age — a history told across a lifetime rather than a decade.
Essay

From kitchen to salon

Most hair work has always been done unpaid, at home, by mothers, sisters, friends and women themselves. This essay follows that labour into the paid salon — a trade, a workplace, a women’s business and a meeting place — mainly in Britain and Ireland, with American and diasporic comparison.
Essay

Black British hair

From suitcases packed with hot combs to Tottenham hair businesses, Brixton salons, Alexandra Palace hair shows and the Halo Code — a history of hair in Black British communities since 1945, told as skill, trade, family time and pleasure as well as struggle.
Essay

How trends travel

From engraved coiffure plates to TikTok, each new medium changed how fast a hairstyle could be seen. This essay follows the channels (prints, photographs, film, fan magazines, trade journals, television and platforms) and asks what evidence could ever show that a famous head caused many others to follow.
Essay

Rules about hair

Prisons, poorhouses, hospitals, kitchens, factories, schools and the army have all written rules about women’s and girls’ hair. This essay compares what the rules said with how they were enforced, separates genuine task-specific safety from demands for a particular look, and asks whose natural hair was treated as the problem — mainly in Britain, from the 1840s to today.
Essay

Heat, electricity and chemistry

Taps, shampoo, tongs, dryers, perm machines, relaxers, synthetic dyes, plastics and fibres all changed what could be done with hair. This essay asks what each one cost in time, labour and money — and who could afford it — mainly in Britain, with American comparison.

Age and life stage

About the age bands

Most fashion histories follow one fashionable young woman. We ask what was expected, allowed and chosen at each stage of life.

Techniques, tools and people

Explore style strands

Technique · Temporary setting

Finger waving

Shaping wet hair with fingers and a comb into rippling S-shaped ridges — the signature set of the late 1920s and 1930s, and a test of skill.
Technique · Temporary setting

Marcel waving

A deep, regular wave made with heated irons — a salon skill that shaped late-Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s hair, and a staple of Black beauty culture.
Technique · Chemical texture change

Permanent waving

Changing the shape of hair until it grows out — from hours attached to a heated machine to a cold-wave kit on the kitchen table.
Technique · Temporary setting

Pressing and straightening

Straightening curly and coily hair with a heated comb, and later with chemical relaxers and smoothing treatments — skilled work with a long, contested history.
Technique · Temporary setting

Roller setting

Winding damp hair on rollers and drying it in place — the engine of the weekly "shampoo and set" and of mid-century volume.
Object · c. 1575 BCE to present

Curling tongs and the Marcel iron

Heated metal pincers for curling and waving hair — a tool with a history of more than three thousand years, from Egyptian bronze to the salon Marcel iron.
Object · Prehistoric to present

The comb

The most ordinary hair tool, and one of the most revealing — from ancient carved combs to celluloid dressing-table sets, wide-toothed picks and heated pressing combs.
Object · 1880s to present in British collections

The hair dryer

From a stoneware bottle of boiling water to the row of humming salon hoods — how drying, the slowest part of every set, was turned into a machine.
Object · Ancient to present

The hairpin

The small, easily lost tool that holds up almost every dressed style in history — from decorated Roman bronze to the mass-produced wire grip.
Object · 1920s onwards; cold-wave kits from the 1940s

The home permanent kit

A box of lotions, rods and papers that brought the permanent wave out of the salon and into the kitchen — and, in some kits, onto children’s heads.
1869 or 1877 – 1957

Annie Turnbo Malone

Founder of the Poro hair-care company and its training network — a pioneer of Black women’s enterprise often overshadowed in popular memory.
1884–1976

Antoine de Paris

Antoni Cierplikowski, a Polish-born hairdresser who became “Antoine” of Paris — a celebrity salon owner long credited with the first fashionable ladies’ bob, a claim still without contemporary proof.
c. 1920–2003

Christina M. Jenkins

Ohio cosmetologist who patented a method of weaving added hair onto a client's own hair in 1952, called it the Hair-Weev, and spent four decades teaching it — a founder of modern sewn-in weaving, not the inventor of added hair.
1930–2014

J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere

Nigerian photographer whose Hairstyles series, begun in 1968, is one of the richest visual records of women’s hair in any country — made in the years after independence from British rule, and now held in London as well as Paris and New York.
1872–1951

Karl Nessler

The Black Forest-born hairdresser who, trading in London as “Charles Nestlé”, patented a heated permanent-waving process in 1909 — then rebuilt his business in New York after wartime internment.
1938–2023

Kwame Brathwaite

Harlem photographer whose pictures of the Grandassa Models and the “Naturally” fashion shows made natural hair a visible ideal of beauty in the early 1960s, and whose images reached Black publications in Britain at the time.
1867–1919

Madam C. J. Walker

Sarah Breedlove built an influential hair-care company and training network — but she did not invent the hot comb.
1852–1936

Marcel Grateau

The Paris hairdresser whose name became the Marcel wave — a heated-iron wave worn for half a century. The technique’s fame is well documented; much of his life, and the patents often credited to him, are not.
1896–1994

Marjorie Stewart Joyner

Beautician, teacher and Walker company executive who patented a permanent-waving machine in 1928 and spent half a century training hairdressers — and organising them.
1912?–2008

Rose Meta Morgan

Harlem beautician and entrepreneur whose Rose Meta House of Beauty was described as the largest Black beauty salon in the world, and who helped found a Black-owned bank in Harlem.
1928–2012

Vidal Sassoon

London hairdresser whose precision, geometric cutting made the cut itself the style in the 1960s — and, for some clients, replaced the weekly shampoo and set with a cut every few weeks.

How to read this site

Hair history is unusually open to invention myths, misdated photographs, timelines centred on Europe and claims led by celebrities. We label the evidence behind each claim so you can see the difference, and we would rather tell a few well-evidenced stories than offer a catalogue that looks complete but cannot be trusted.

Research current to 12 November 2026. Read our editorial policy.

Evidence status: Verified: Supported by a reliable source cited on the page.
Evidence status: Research: Needs primary or specialist confirmation. The text beside it says what is still to check.
Evidence status: Interpretation: A historical argument — ours or a named historian’s — not a plain fact.
Evidence status: Current: Time-sensitive information, with a scheduled review date.