Now Hair This

If you have hair, there is a good chance that you don't like it. If it is curly, you want it straight. If it is straight, you want it curly. If you are a brunette, you want to be a blond, and if you are a blond, you want dark, exotic tresses. Whole aisles of supermarkets and department stores are devoted to potions, lotions, and equipment to allow you to blow, dye, twist, perm, straighten, clean and rinse.

Back in the earliest days of my childhood, I remember two instruments of torture. One for perming and another for curling. The first as shown above was an electrical system to provide heat to hair treated with solution and being fried into curls. The second were curling irons that were heated on the stove and applied to straight hair to make ringlets. If you think brushing through tangles made a child scream, you should have heard the bellows when the curling iron was too hot.

One of the most interesting historical sites on the web is the Marine Maritime Museum This link will take you to some of the exhibits about hair and the irons, hair products, and souvenirs from around the world that were used or brought home by the men on the great sailing ships.