Why Historical Hair Care is the Future (Not the Past)
- Katherine Haircare
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
For over 20 years, I believed my hair was biologically incapable of growing long—until I realized the entire modern hair care industry was designed to keep it that way. When I discovered historical hair care, all of that changed. My hair is now twice as long as it ever was before, and healthier than ever - but with fewer products than I ever used to use. So in today’s video, I am going to be sharing the four reasons why historical hair care is the future, not the past!
Reason #1 - They Had Better Results
It’s indisputable that there are tons of women in various periods of history - and men, for that matter - that had really long, gorgeous hair. Now, some may say that these were just exceptional cases, and that really everyone else just had, like, shoulder-length hair or something, but I personally think that’s a little ridiculous. We can find countless paintings and photos of women from all periods of history with at least waist-length hair, whereas today we would be hard-pressed to find a woman with waist-length hair.
Sure, fashions have changed, meaning many people simply keep their hair cut shorter, but we still have a very large segment of the population who DO really desire long hair, and have been trying for years to grow it, with no success. Whereas I can find a historical source from as recent as the early 1900s, when hair care had already begun to change, that references that many girls as young as 13 years old had waist-length hair. Did everyone have ankle-length hair? No, but there was still a relatively significant number of women who did, and those who didn’t still had hair that was on average much longer than ours.
Today, it seems that we also have another problem. There are more people than ever who are beginning to lose significant amounts of hair beginning as young as their 20s. I would argue that both of these problems - the seeming inability for many (or most) people to grow long hair, as well as the massive propensity towards hair loss in both men and women, are casualties of the times we live in. At a time when saving time is the top priority, hair care is very much an industry designed to keep people dependent on and buying chemically-based hair products. Not to mention the prevalence of full-blown chemical treatments like hair dyes, straightening, perms, and very common use of heat tools.
So what is the second reason historical haircare is the future, not the past?
Reason #2 It’s Tested by Time
This is the main concept that drew me to historical hair care in the first place. Ideas and practices that have persisted for long periods of time are often more trustworthy than those which are recent innovations. Especially when it comes to practical, on-the-ground lifestyle choices - like hair care.
Let’s take a basic hair care practice like washing hair frequency - historically, hair was washed quite infrequently according to modern standards. If many cultures practiced what is by modern standards very infrequent hair washing, and had on average healthier, longer hair than in the modern day, it stands to reason that infrequent hair washing, if not causal of long hair, is at least compatible with keeping hair long and healthy. Make sense?
This is the main reason why, having struggled for years with no success to grow long hair, I figured there must be something wrong with modern hair care practices. After all, I had done pretty much everything modern people would say is conducive to growing long hair, and it had failed miserably. Therefore, having become convinced that historical women tended towards longer, healthier hair than people today, I realized it was time to do some digging.
First of all, in what ways did historical hair care differ from that in the modern day? And second, was I willing to let go of my preconceived ways of doing things in order to accept radically different practices? Like dry-detangling my thick, curly, tangle-prone hair, for example. This felt completely opposite to how I’d been taught, by modern curly hair culture, to care for my hair. But once I learned to embrace something that felt wrong to my modern brain, everything began to change.
Reason #3 - Less Consumeristic
Historical hair care is inherently less consumeristic than modern hair care, and this is something we should be thinking about more than ever in today’s world. It's estimated that over 552 million shampoo bottles are discarded annually in the US alone. Not to mention the actual products themselves - chemically-based concoctions that are being rinsed down the drains of every shower and ending up in water systems.
Historical people were not any more environmentally conscious than you and I, at least not through conscious choice. They simply were by default. Plastics hadn’t been invented yet, and even commercially produced hair products were still very small market productions - likely family-run businesses. Not global multi-million dollar corporations like what we have today. Even if companies would have wanted to be that powerful in the past, the technology simply didn’t exist to support it.
Therefore, the historical hair care techniques we see were, first of all, much less based on products at all. They were based on techniques and lifestyle practices. For example, at least for those with straighter hair, nightly boar bristle brushing was both a technique as well as a lifestyle that allowed women to achieve clean, smooth, shiny, manageable hair - without any products other than their own scalp oils! They would buy a hairbrush and comb set once, and use it for their entire life, possibly even passing it on to the next generation. Do you see how powerful corporations desiring recurring income would be unhappy with this situation and seek to change it through clever marketing?
Protective styling, and nightly braiding of the hair was also a way of life that greatly reduced the need for external styling products. Also, at many points in history and in many cultures, the hair was covered decoratively in all kinds of beautiful ways - with scarves, shawls, and headdresses - which was again, a way of preserving the health, shine, and moisture of the hair, without the need for any products to do so.
Even a practice like this can easily be translated to the modern world. I use scarves over my hair when I am at home and want to just put away and forget about my hair in a way that still keeps it safe. You can also artfully use scarves to wrap your hair when going out - for example, vintage hair scarf styles. And finally, snoods are another vintage style easily transferable to our modern world, as I showed in a previous video that will be linked for you below.
On to the last reason historical hair care is the future, not the past . . .
Reason #4 - More Self-Sufficient
Historical hair care was more self-sufficient. This fits quite nicely into our last point about it being less consumeristic, but there are nuances here.
For example, sorry hairdressers, but women in history didn’t really go to hairdressers - at least not to cut, dye, or otherwise treat their hair. Hairdressers existed, but generally these would be only available to the wealthy, and they would be in-home servants whose main job was to literally “dress” the hair - put it up in elaborate styles and so forth. These types of servants may have been the same people who would later brush out the wealthy lady’s hair before bed. But apart from these historical forms of “hairdressers” - the type of hairdresser we think of today, who “cuts the hair in a face-framing style”, or applies chemical hair dyes, were not a thing. Any hair trimming that happened for women - which was minimal, and something along the lines of “micro trims” - would happen at home, either with female family members, friends, or servants for those who could afford it.
In history, haircuts were not at all the focus of what it meant to “have good hair”. Having good hair had far more to do with small, daily, self-sufficient hair care practices - like that nightly boar bristle brushing, or that protective styling that we talked about earlier - that all contributed to healthy hair. Not to mention the lack of reliance on external commercial hair products. Even the products that historical women did use were usually DIY products. Tons of old recipe books exist for hair and cosmetic DIY recipes, that used ingredients easily available, either from the kitchen or garden. Having made the leap from a curly girl “product junkie” who felt that my hair would be a horrible mess without loads of conditioners and gel, to now using just a couple DIY natural ingredients and having naturally beautiful curls, has been a huge confidence booster.
Having made the leap from a product-heavy routine to completely natural practices has changed everything for me. In fact, I went as far as slow-infusing my own historically inspired, 14-ingredient herbal hair growth oil after noticing that most growth oils on Amazon rely on just 2 or 3 ingredients. I've tweaked and perfected this formula for the last 8 years, intending on keeping it a family secret, but finally decided to make it available to the public last year. If it feels aligned with your journey, you can check it out here. See you for the next article!
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