Hair in Ancient Rome: Styles, Beards, Shaving, Barbers, Slave Stylists

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ANCIENT ROMAN HAIRSTYLES


Etruscan hairstyle

Short hair was commonly worn by men in Rome although in the earliest times they wore long hair as did non-Romans. Under the Republic women’s hair was simply arranged, but throughout the Imperial period a variety of styles prevailed at different times, most of which were conspicuous for their bad taste and so elaborate that the desired effect was produced by wearing wigs and wire supports. [Source: “The Daily Life of the Greeks and Romans”, Helen McClees Ph.D, Gilliss Press, 1924]

Roman women curled their hair in a corkscrew fashion. Men primarily wore their hair short and went beardless. Archaeologists can date Roman sculptures by hair and clothing styles. During the Augustan Age women parted their hair in the middle with a central roll. The Flauvians and Antiones had more elaborate coiffures that resembled a honeycombs of curls. ["The Creators" by Daniel Boorstin]

Hair-care articles including hairpins, scissors, hand mirrors made of highly polished metal, combs, and boxes for unguent or powder. Styles of wearing hair and beard varied with the years of the persons concerned and with the period. The hair of children, boys and girls alike, was allowed to grow long and hang around the neck and shoulders. When the boy assumed the toga of manhood, the long locks were cut off, sometimes with a good deal of formality, and under the Empire they were often made an offering to some deity.

Dyed Hair and Wigs in Ancient Rome

Both men and women changed their hair in various ways. Dyeing the hair was very popular among women, with blonde being a favorite color, and also practiced by men. Men and women also wore wigs and hair extensions. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]

Unlike the Greeks, who preferred light hair, the Romans liked dark hair. Many older Romans dyed their hair to hide gray with dyes made from burned walnut shells and leeks. To prevent graying some Romans wore a paste at night made from herbs and earthworms. The Roman remedy for baldness was bear grease and crushed myrtle berries. Pigeon dung was used to lighten hair. Greeks and Romans used a variety of hairpins.

Some Romans wore blonde wigs made from the hair of German captives. Ovid once wrote that there was so much German hair around that no one ever to worry about baldness. Blonde wigs were the trademark of Roman prostitutes. Prostitutes in Rome wore bright yellow wigs to advertise their services Caligula and the demented empress Messalina used to go slumming in the sex districts of Rome in blond wigs. Hannibal donned a toupee before going into battle and Marcus Aurelius was said to have owned several hundred wigs. Some Roman statues were even fitted with hair pieces.

Barbers in Ancient Rome

The Latin word for beard, “ barba”, is the source of the word barber. Varro tells us that professional barbers first came to Rome in the year 300 B.C., People of wealth and position had the hair and beard kept in order by their own slaves; these slaves, if they were skillful barbers, brought high prices in the market. People of the middle class went to public barber shops, and gradually made them places of general resort for the idle and the gossiping. But in all periods the hair and beard were allowed was a sign of sorrow, and were the regular accompaniments of the mourning garb already mentioned. The very poor went usually unshaven and unshorn; this was the cheap and easy fashion. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932)]


short hair and shaved face of Julius Caesar

Hair-care of Roman men was performed by tonsor (barber), to whose care he confided the cut of his beard and the arrangement of his hair. This was already the essential cura corporis for Julius Caesar whose fastidiousness as a dandy Suetonius has not failed to record for us in this 'connection. By the second century the barber-hairdresser had become a tyrant. The man who was rich enough to include tonsores in his household retinue put himself in their hands in the morning and again, if necessary, in the course of the day.[Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

Those unable to face the considerable expense of keeping a private hairdresser would go at varying hours, as often as seemed necessary, to one of the innumerable barbershops in the tabernae of the city, or which did business in the open for their humbler customers. Idlers went frequently and dawdled there. If we consider the time they spent and the anxieties which obsessed them, it is perhaps hardly fair to call "idlers" men who were continually busy dividing their attention between the comb and the mirror : "hos tu otiosos vocas inter pectinem speculumque occupatos?" The crowd which assembled from dawn to the eighth hour was so great that the tonstrina became a rendezvous, a club, a gossip shop, an inexhaustible dispensary of information, a place for arranging interviews and the like. On the other hand, so motley and so composite was the crowd that few sights were more picturesque, and from the time of Augustus lovers of painting seized on it as a subject for genre pictures such as the Alexandrians had loved. The hairdresser's fee was so generous that we frequently find in Juvenal's Satires and Martial's Epigrams allusion to the ex-barber who has made his pile and has transmogrified himself into an Eques or a wealthy landed proprietor.

The hairdresser's shop was surrounded with benches on which the waiting clients sat. Mirrors hung on the walls so that customers might give themselves a critical glance on leaving the chair. In the center, his clothes sometimes protected by a simple napkin, large or small (mappa or sudarium), sometimes by a wrap (involucrum) of cambric (linteum) or of muslin (sindon), the victim whose turn had come would seat himself on a stool while the barber, surrounded by his officious assistants (circitores), would cut his hair or, if it had not grown too much since his last visit, would merely dress it for him in the latest mode of the day. The fashion of hairdressing was determined by the mode affected by the sovereign. With the exception of Nero, who liked to mass his hair artistically, the emperors appear from their coins and their busts to have conformed, at least down to Trajan, as much to the example of Augustus, who never granted more than a few hasty moments to his tonsores, as to the aesthetic ideal expounded simultaneously by Quintilian and by Martial, both of whom were equally hostile to long hair and piled-up curls. At the beginning of the second century the majority of Romans were therefore content with a simple haircut and a stroke of the comb. The comb was all the more necessary since the haircut was performed with a pair of iron scissors (forfex) whose two blades were as innocent of a common pivot as their base was of rings for the operator's fingers. Its efficiency, therefore, left much to be desired, and it could not avoid the irregularities which we call "steps'' and which according to Horace's Epistles exposed the victim to public derision.

Shaving in Ancient Rome

Shaving didn't become widespread until the Roman era. Roman men reportedly shaved daily. We know that the razor and shears were used by the Romans long before their history begins. Pliny the Elder says that the Younger Scipio (died 129 B.C.) was the first Roman to shave every day, and the story may be true.

Scipio Aemilianus (185-129 B.C.) liked to be shaved every day; and did not give it up even when he ought to have renounced it in protest against the unjust accusations which were being levelled at him. Forty years later the fashion he had set had spread under the dictatorship, as if the spirit of Greek civilisation from which in its own despite the dictatorship drew its inspiration had extended its ascendancy from the fundamentals of political government to the minutest details of everyday life. Sulla was clean-shaven. Caesar, his true successor, attached the greatest importance to appearing always freshly shaved. After he became emperor, Augustus would not have dreamed of neglecting to submit daily to the barber's razor.


ancient Roman razors

By the end of the first century B.C. nothing but the gravest or most painful crisis would have induced the great men of the day to omit a formality which had become for them a state duty: Caesar, after the massacre of his lieutenants by the Eburones; Cato of Utica, after the outbreak of the civil war; Anthony after his check at Modena; Augustus after the fresh disaster of Varus. Under the empire, from Tiberius to Trajan, the principes never failed to shave; and their subjects would have thought themselves unworthy of their imperial masters if they had not followed suit. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

To tell the truth, shaving was for the Romans a sort of religious rite. The first time that a young man's beard fell to the barber's razor was made the occasion of a religious ceremony: the depositio barbae. The dates on which the emperors and their relations performed it have duly been recorded: Augustus himself, September, 39 B.C.; Marcellus while he was taking part in the expedition against the Cantabrians, 25 B.C.; Caligula and Nero at the time that they assumed the toga virilis 4 Ordinary citizens copied their doings with scrupulous exactitude. Mourning parents recorded in an epitaph that their dead son had just "deposited his beard," in his twenty-third year, at the same age as Augustus; and just as Nero had consecrated the hairs of his first beard sacrifice in a golden casket offered to Capitoline Jove, so Trimalchio exhibited to his guests a golden pyx, in which he had similarly deposited his lanugo, in his private chapel between the silver statuettes of his lares and a marble statuette of Venus. Poor men for their part had to get along with a pyx of glass; and in Juvenal's day rich and poor made this solemnity a festival according to and indeed often beyond their means, with rejoicings and feastings to which all the friends of the family were invited.

The comment may be made that archaeologists have discovered numbers of razors in prehistoric and Etruscan ruins, but that by what at first seems a curious paradox they have found few or none in their Roman excavations. The explanation is simple. The razors of Terra Mare and of the Etruscans were of bronze, while the Roman razor, whether the razor properly so called (novacula) or the knife which served either for shaving or for cutting the nails (culter or cultellus), was of iron and has been eaten by rust. These iron instruments, or jerramenta, to use the generic name applied to every variety of them, were both fragile and perishable tools. This, however, was their least serious demerit. In vain the tonsor whetted them on his hone or whetstone a laminitana bought in Spain, which he lubricated by spitting on it; do what he would, the edge of his razor passed ineffectively and dangerously over a skin which had not been softened beforehand either by soap-suds or by oil.

There is, so far as I know, but one text which throws any light on these details, and in my opinion it establishes beyond question that the only lotion ever applied by the Roman barber to his client's face was water pure and simple. Plutarch tells a delightful anecdote of the prodigality of M. Antonius Creticus, father of Anthony the Triumvir. One day a friend came to beg a loan from him. Now money had a way of burning a hole in his pocket, and the unfortunate spendthrift had to confess that his wife held the purse-strings tightly drawn and had not left him a penny to bless himself with. In this predicament he thought of a ruse to defeat his impecuniosity and satisfy his friend. He called to a slave to bring him some water in a silver bowl, and proceeded to wet his beard as if he were going to be shaved. Then, making a pretext to dismiss the slave, he handed the silver basin to his friend, who went off well content. Obviously the stratagem of Antonius Creticus would have had no point unless the barber's sole preliminary was to pass clean water over his face.

Skilled and Unskilled Roman Barbers

The daily recurrent task of the tonsor was to trim or shave the beard. The barber used scissors to cut the beard which was to be offered as "first fruits" to the divinity; and adolescents whose chins were still covered only with a more or less abundant down usually waited till their boyhood was well over before embarking on their first shave. But once a certain age was passed, no one but a soldier or a philosopher could decently have ventured any longer to shrink from the razor. Martial compares unshaven men to the African he-goats who feed by the shores of Cyniphs between the two Syrtes. The very slaves were sent off to the tonsores who operated in the open air on humbler folk, unless their master for economy invited his own barber to try his hand on their skin. For no one shaved himself. The clumsy instruments and awkward technique which were all they had at their disposal forced the Romans to place themselves in the hands of specialists. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

In these circumstances it is clear that the barber needed to be an expert of no common dexterity. It was not until he had served a long apprenticeship to a master and had learned to handle the blunt razors of a beginner that he obtained the right to open a barbershop on his own account. Even then his trade bristled with difficulties and dangers. The virtuosos who excelled in it soon acquired a fame which poets did not disdain to commemorate in their verse. To the memory of such a one Martial composed the following delicate epitaph: Within this tomb lies Pantagathus, snatched away in boyhood's years, his master's grief and sorrow, skilled to cut with steel that scarcely touched the straggling hairs, and to trim the bearded cheeks. Gentle and light upon him thou mayst be, O earth, as it behoves thee; lighter than the artist's hand thou canst not be.


Pantagathus unfortunately belonged to the cream of his profession; most of his colleagues were far from commanding equal skill. The tonsores of the cross-roads in particular exposed their humble customers to most disagreeable experiences. A moment of inattention on their part, an accident in the, street, an unexpected push or shove from the crowd, the impact of a missile suddenly thrown, and the barber's hand might slip, inflicting a wound on his client for which the jurists of Augustus thought it well to determine the responsibility and assess the damages in advance. At the beginning of the second century no progress had been made, and the barber's victims had usually to choose between a cautious but interminable treatment and the scars of a speedy but dangerous and bloody operation. The most famous barbers cultivated an incredible leisureliness. Augustus outwitted this by unrolling a manuscript or resorting to his stylus and tablets while the tonsor was attending to him. A hundred years later the barber's slowness was still the subject of jest: "While nimble Eutrapelus goes round Lupercus 7 face and trims his cheeks a second beard grows."

A barber, young, but such an artist as was not even Nero's Thalamus to whom fell the beards of the Drusi, I lent on his request to Rufus once to smooth his cheeks. While at command he was going over the same hairs, guiding his hand by the judgment of the mirror, and smoothing the skin, and making a second thorough clip of the dose-cut hair, my barber became a bearded man himself.

At the hands of the average tonsor the torment did not last so long but was proportionately more painful: He who desires not yet to go down to Stygian shades, let him, if he be wise, avoid barber Antiochus. White arms are mangled with knives less cruel when the frenzied throng, the votaries of Cybele, raves to Phrygian strains; with gentler touch the surgeon Alcon cuts the knotted hernia and lops away broken bones with a workman's hand.... These scars, what'er they are thou numberest on my chin, scars such as are fixed on some time-worn boxer's face these a wife formidable with wrathful talons wrought not 'tis Antiochus 1 steel and hand accursed. Alone among all beasts the he-goat has good sense: bearded he lives to escape Antiochus.

These gashes were so frequent that Pliny the Elder has preserved for us the receipt for the plaster which was found suitable to staunch the bleeding, a receipt unpleasant enough: spider's webs soaked in oil and vinegar. To be honest, it required courage of no mean order to go to the barber's; inconvenience for inconvenience, suffering for suffering, the Romans often preferred to have recourse to other expedients, like Martial's Gargilianus: "With salve you smooth your cheeks, and with hair-eradicator your bald pate: surely you are not afraid, Gargilianus, of a barber?" Some went daily to the dropacista: "You stroll about sleek with curled hair... you are smoothed with depilatory daily.... Cease to call me brother, Charmenion, lest I call you sister!" The dropax used for these purposes was a depilatory liniment made of a resin and pitch; alternatively the face might be rubbed with psilothrum, an ingredient procured from the white vine, or some other of the pastes formed with a base of ivy gum, ass's fat, she-goat's gall, bat's blood, or powdered viper, all of which Pliny lists for us. Some preferred to take the Naturalist's advice and combine these applications with direct epilation, and like Julius Caesar before them, or like women nowadays, to have their hairs individually plucked out with tweezers (volsella). Some dandies pushed endurance to the point of begging their tonsor to use simultaneously on their skin scissors, razor, and depilatory-pincers according to convenience, incurring the gibe of Martial as they left the tonstrina: 'Tart of your jaw is clipped, part is shaved, part is plucked of hairs. Who would imagine this' to be a single head?"

Beards in Ancient Rome


Hadrian with curly hair and beard

During most of their history the Romans did not wear beards or moustaches. The Romans in early times wore full beards, as did non-Romans peoples. During the Empire fashion fluctuated, following the style favored by the reigning emperor. After the time of Trajan beards were usual.

The Romans, like the Greeks, had for a long time worn beards as a matter of course. The Greeks cut theirs, following the example and obeying the command of Alexander. It was a hundred and fifty years before the Romans began to imitate them. At the beginning of the second century B.C. Titus Quinctius Flamininus on his proconsular coins and Cato the Elder in the literary allusions to his censorship and to his person are both represented as bearded. A generation later the number of beards had decreased. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

In the classical period young men seem to have worn close-clipped beards; at least Cicero jeers at those who followed Catiline for wearing full beards, and on the other hand declares that their companions who could show no signs of beard on their faces were worse than effeminate. Mature men wore the hair cut short and the face shaved clean. Most of the portraits that have come down to us show beardless men until well into the second century of our era, but after the time of Hadrian the full beard became fashionable.” |+|

Emperor Julian, the Mispogon (or "Beard-Hater")

The Emperor Julian (born A.D. 332, ruled 361- 363) ruled about three years about 25 years after Constantine’s death. A follower of Mithraism, which he called "the guide of the souls", he tried to undo the work of Constantine and led a concerted effort to re-instate paganism as the dominant religion in the empire.

Julian came to Antioch on his way to Persia in the autumn of 361 and stayed there till March, A.D. 362. His austere personality and mode of life repelled the Syrian populace and the corrupt officials of Antioch. They satirised him in anapaestic verses, and either stayed away from the temples that he restored or, when they did attend in response to his summons, showed by their untimely applause of the Emperor that they had not come to worship his gods. Julian's answer was this satire on himself which he addresses directly to the people of Antioch. But he could not resist scolding them, and the satire on his own habits is not consistently maintained. After he had left the city the citizens repented and sent a deputation to make their peace with him, but in spite of the intercession of Libanius, who had accompanied him to Antioch, he could not forgive the insults to himself or the irreverence that had been displayed to the gods.

Julian wrote: As for praising myself, though I should be very glad to do so, I have no reason for that; but for criticising myself I have countless reasons, and first I will begin with my face. For though nature did not make this any too handsome or well-favored or give it the bloom of youth, I myself out of sheer perversity and ill-temper have added to it this long beard of mine, to punish it, as it would seem, for this very crime of not being handsome by nature. For the same reason I put up with the lice that scamper about in it as though it were a thicket for wild beasts. As for eating greedily or drinking with my mouth wide open, it is not in my power; for I must take care, I suppose, or before I know it I shall eat up some of my own hairs along with my crumbs of bread. In the matter of being kissed and kissing I suffer no inconvenience whatever.

And yet for this as for other purposes a beard is evidently troublesome, since it does not allow me to press shaven "lips to other lips more sweetly" -because they are smooth, I suppose -as has been said already by one of those who with the aid of Pan and Calliope composed poems in honor of Daphnis. But you say that I ought to twist ropes from it. Well I am willing to provide you with ropes if only you have the strength to pull them and their roughness does not do dreadful damage to your "unworn and tender hands." And let no one suppose that I am offended by your satire. For I myself furnish you with an excuse for it by wearing my chin as goats do, when I might, I suppose, make it smooth and bare as handsome youths wear theirs, and all women, who are endowed by nature with loveliness. But you, since even in your old age you emulate your own sons and daughters by your soft and delicate way of living, or perhaps by your effeminate dispositions, carefully make your chins smooth, and your manhood you barely reveal and slightly indicate by your foreheads, not by your jaws as I do.

“But as though the mere length of my beard were not enough, my head is dishevelled besides, and I seldom have my hair cut or my nails, while my fingers are nearly always black from using a pen. And if you would like to learn something that is usually a secret, my breast is shaggy, and covered with hair, like the breasts of lions who among wild beasts are monarchs like me, and I have never in my life made it smooth, so ill-conditioned and shabby am I, nor have I made any other part of my body smooth or soft. If I had a wart like Cicero, I should tell you so; but as it happens I have none. And by your leave I will tell you something else. I am not content with having my body in this rough condition, but in addition the mode of life that I practice is very strict indeed. I banish myself from the theaters, such a dolt am I, and I do not admit the thymele within my court except on the first day of the year, because I am too stupid to appreciate it.

Men's Hairstyles in Ancient Rome

Men's hairstyles in ancient Rome were relatively simple. Before razors were introduced in Rome around 300 B.C., men tended to wear both their hair and their beards long. After razors became more commonplace, short hair, combed forward — like the general and statesman Julius Caesar (100–44 B.C.) — became the most common hairstyle for men and remains with us even today. Beards went in and out of fashion, often depending on whether or not the ruling emperor had one.[Source: Encyclopedia.com]

By the A.D. second century many Roman men began to prefer curls to the straight haircut. Hadrian, his son Lucius Caesar, and his grandson Lucius Verus are all shown in their effigies with artificially-curled hair, produced either by appropriate manoeuvres of the comb (ftexo ad pectinem capillo) or by the aid of a calamistrum, a curlingiron which the ciniflones had heated in its metal sheath under burning coals, and round which the tonsor twisted the hair with expert hand. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]


statue of a young girl wearing a wig

This practice had become current not only with young men, who could not be blamed for indulging in the practice, but also among older folk whose scantier hair lent itself badly to a treatment too flattering not to be ridiculous. “From one side and from the other”, writes Martial, “you gather up your scanty locks and you cover, Marinus, the wide expanse of your shining bald scalp with the hair from both sides of your head. But blown about they come back at the bidding of the wind, and return to themselves and gird your bare poll with big curls on this sid and on that.... Will you please in simpler fashion confess yourself old, so as after all to appear so? Nothing is more unsightly than a bald head with dressed hair.

It was part of the tensor's business to complete the youthful illusion which his clients sought by pouring dye on the curls so laboriously attained, spraying them with perfume, spreading make-up cream on the cheeks, and gumming on little circles of cloth -either to conceal the flaws of an unattractive skin or to enhance the brilliance of a poor complexion. These spots were known as splenia lunata or, as we should call them, "patches." These more obvious refinements never ceased to bring down vigorous ridicule on their addicts, from the lampoons of Cicero on the damp fringes of certain fops among his enemies to the epigrams launched by Martial against their later imitators: "Constantly smeared darkly with cassia and cinnamon and the perfumes from the nest of the lordly phoenix, you reek of the leaden jars of the perfumer Niceros, and therefore you laugh at us, Coracinus, who smell of nothing. To smelling of scent I prefer to smell of nothing." Or again: "There is about you always some foreign odour. This is suspect to me, your being always well-scented." Or: "Rufus, whose greasy hair is smelt all over Marcellus' theater... while numerous patches star and plaster his brow."

Women’s Hair in Ancient Rome

Roman women regularly wore no hat, but covered their head when necessary with the palla or with a veil. Much attention was given to the arrangement of the hair, the fashions being as numerous and as inconstant as they are today. For young girls the favorite arrangement, perhaps, was to comb the hair back and gather it into a knot (nodus) on the back of the neck. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]

In the early years of Roman history, women tended to wear their hair long and simply, parting it in the center and gathered it behind the head in a bun or a ponytail. As time went on hairstyles became more complex and elaborate. By the the founding of the Roman Empire in 27 B.C., there were slaves that specialized in hair styling, adept at curling and braiding hair, sometimes piling it on the top or back of their head using headdresses and frames to keep it in place. There archeologists and scientists have discovered a wide array of hair grooming accessories in the tombs of Roman women, including hair curlers, pins, and ribbons. [Source: Encyclopedia.com]

For keeping the hair in place pins were used, of ivory, silver, and gold, often mounted with jewels.” Some wealthy Roman women favored long hairpins encrusted with jewels. Cleopatra used a hollowed version of such a pin to conceal the poison she allegedly used to kill herself. “Nets (reticulae) and ribbons (vittae, taeniae, fasciolae) were also worn, but combs were not made a part of the headdress. The Roman woman of fashion did not scruple, if she chose, to color her hair (the golden-red color of the Greek hair was especially admired) or to use false hair, which had become an article of commercial importance early in the Empire. Mention should also be made of the garlands (coronae) of flowers, or of flowers and foliage, and of the coronets of pearls and other precious stones that were used to supplement the natural or artificial beauty of the hair. |+|

Elaborate Women’s Hairstyles in Ancient Rome


back of a woman with an elaborate hairstyle

Some upper class Roman women spent hours with there hairdressers, creating elaborate coiffures and this indulgent behavior was often satirized in plays. By the A.D. second century in the Roman Empire this was no small affair. Women had long since given up the simplicity of the republican coiffure restored to honor for a space by Claudius in which a straight, even parting divided the hair in front and a simple chignon gathered it together at the back. They were no longer content with braids raised on pads above the forehead, such as we see in the busts of Livia and Octavia. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

With Messalina there came in those complicated and high-piled methods of hairdressing which are familiar to us from illustrations of women during the Flavian period. In later years, though the ladies of the court who set the fashion, Marciana, sister of Trajan, Matidia, his niece, gave up these styles, they nevertheless preserved the custom of dressing their hair in diadems as high as towers.

"Behold," says Statius in one of his Silvae, "behold the glory of this sublime forehead and the stagings of her coiffure." Juvenal makes merry in his turn about the contrast between the height of a certain fine lady and the pretentiousness of her piled-up hair to which there seemed no limit: "So numerous are the tiers and stories piled one upon another on her head! In front you would take her for an Andromache; she is not so tall behind; you would not think it was the same person."

Ornatrix — Ancient Roman Slave Hairstylists

In ancient Rome an ornatrix was a female slave who beautified and adorned their owners by creating elaborate hairstyles, arranging clothing and jewelry, and applying and recommending cosmetics and perfumes. The ornatrix used all sorts of unguents, oils, and tonics to make the hair soft and lustrous.

Roman women were as dependent on their ornatrix as their husbands on the tonsor (a Roman barber). The skill of the tire-woman was indispensable for erecting these elaborate scaffoldings, and the epitaphs of many ornatriccs tell us the dates of their death and the families by whom they were employed. The woman had to devote as much time to her stance with the ornatrix as her husband had to give to the barber; and she suffered as much on these occasions as he did, especially if like the Julia of whom Macrobius tells she bade her tire-woman pitilessly tear out the greying hairs. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

The post of ornatrix was far from Secure. If perchance her mistress, worn out by holding one pose everlastingly, suddenly decided that the result “If Madame has an appointment and wishes to be turned out more nicely than usual”, writes Juvenal, “the unhappy Psecas who does her hair will have her own hair torn, and the clothes stripped off her shoulders and her breasts. "Why is this curl standing up?" she asks, and then down comes a thong of bull's hide to inflict chastisement for the offending ringlet!

Martial for his part relates: "One curl of the whole round of hair had gone astray, badly fixed by an insecure pin. This crime Lalage avenged with the mirror in which she had observed it and Plecusa, smitten, fell because of those savage locks!" m Happy, in these circumstances, was the ornatrix whose mistress was bald! With a minimum of risk she could adjust the artificial tresses (crines, galerus, corymbium), or at need an entire wig. Sometimes the false hair was dyed blond with the sapo of Mainz obtained by blending goat's fat with beech ash; sometimes it was an ebony black, like the cut hair imported from India in such quantities that the imperial government entered capilli Indict among the commodities which had to pay customs duty.


Roman tweezers

The ornatrix 's duties did not end there, however. She had still to remove her mistress's superfluous hair, and above all to "paint" her: white on brow and arms with chalk and white lead; red on cheeks and lips with ochre, fucus, or the lees of wine; black with ashes (fuligo) or powdered antimony on the eyebrows and round the eyes. The tire-woman's palette was a collection of pots and flagons, Greek vases and alabaster jars, of gutti and pyxes from which as ordered she extracted liniments, pomades, and make-up. The mistress of the house normally kept this arsenal locked in a cupboard in the nuptial room (thalamus).

In the morning she spread out everything on the table beside the powdered horn which, following Messalina's example, she used to enamel her teeth. Before calling her ornatrices to get to work, she took care to secure the door, for she knew from Ovid that art does not beautify a woman's face unless it be concealed. When she set out for the bath she took all her apparatus with her, each pot and jar in its own compartment in a special little box, sometimes made of solid silver, which was called by the generic name of capsa or alabastrotheca; these various jars contained her daytime face, which she made up on rising, made up again after her bath, and did not un-make until after nightfall at the last moment before going to bed: "You lie stored away in a hundred caskets, and your face does not sleep with you!"

Did Romans Start the Trend of Shaving and Removing One’s Body Hair?

Brendan Rascius wrote in the Miami Herald: If you’ve ever shaved your armpits, gone for a wax, or even looked askance at someone sporting visible body hair, you may have the Romans to blame. It turns out that our hairless body beauty standard was widely popularized by ancient Romans, who were obsessed with shorn hair and smooth skin, written texts and archaeological discoveries reveal. [Source: Brendan Rascius, Miami Herald, May 31, 2023]

It’s long been known that the many early inhabitants of the Italian peninsula, whether rich or poor, were preoccupied with grooming themselves. Julius Caesar reportedly had “superfluous hair” plucked from his body. Ordinary citizens, too, would have been familiar with hair removers, in addition to other cosmetic products, according to a study published in 2019 in the journal Toxicology in Antiquity. But a new discovery reveals just how prevalent and trendy the practice of body hair removal was even in the far reaches of the Roman Empire, according to English Heritage, a charity that manages hundreds of historic sites.

A large collection of ancient tweezers was recently unveiled at Wroxeter, a Roman town in England about 150 miles northwest of London that was once double the size of Pompeii. “At Wroxeter alone we have discovered over 50 pairs of tweezers, one of the largest collections of this item in Britain, indicating that it was a popular accessory,” Cameron Moffett, an English Heritage curator, stated in the news release. “The advantage of the tweezer was that it was safe, simple and cheap, but unfortunately not pain free,” Moffett added.

Both men and women in Wroxeter would have opted for the clean-shaven look in order to keep up with the fashions of Rome and to differentiate themselves from their “barbarian” countrymen, researchers said. The painful, slow task of plucking hair would likely have been performed by enslaved people, according to researchers. After having their hair removed, a resident of Wroxeter might have cleaned their nails, scooped the wax from inside their ears and gone for a communal bath. These grooming habits would have consumed large portions of their time, researchers said. The newly unearthed tweezers, along with hundreds of other artifacts, such as perfume bottles and jewelry, are now on display at a new museum in Wroxeter.

Hair Removal in Ancient Rome

Depilation refers to removal of hair. Leonard C. Smithers and Sir Richard Burton wrote in the notes of “Sportive Epigrams on Priapus”: “Martial derides catamites for depilating their privy parts and buttocks. The following version of Martial's epigram against a beau (bellus homo) is given by Dr James Cranstoun in the illustrative notes to his translation of Catullus:


“Cotilus, you are a beau; yes, Cotilus, many declare it.
Such is the story I hear: tell me, then, what is a beau?
Why, sir, a beau is a man who arranges his tresses in order:
Smelling for ever of balm, smelling of cinnamon spice:
Singing the songs of the Nile or a-humming the ditties of Cadiz:

Never at rest with his arms, moving them this way or that:
Lounging on sofas from morning to night with a bevy of ladies:
Aye in the ears of some girl whispering some silly tale:
Reading a letter from Rhode or Chloe, or writing to Phyllis:
Shunning the sleeve of his friend lest he should ruffle his dress:
Everyone's sweetheart he'll tell you, he swaggers the lion at parties:
Bets on the favourite horse, tells you his sire and his dam.
Cotilus, what are you telling me? — this thing! is this thing a beau?
Cotilus, then I must say he's a contemptible thing.” [Source: “Sportive Epigrams on Priapus” translation by Leonard C. Smithers and Sir Richard Burton, 1890, sacred-texts.com]

“Juvenal devotes his finest Satire (the second) to a forcible denunciation of the infamous practices of these sodomites. In it he says: “One man with a needle slanted, lengthens his eyebrows, touched with moistened soot, and, lifting up his eyelids, paints his quivering eyes. Another drinks from a Priapus-shaped glass, and confines his flowing locks in a golden net, clothing himself in cerulean checks or greenish-yellow vestments, whilst his valet swears by the Juno of his master. A third holds a mirror, the accoutrement of pathic Otho, 'the spoil of Auruncan Actor', in which he viewed himself, armed for battle, when he commanded the standards to be raised.”

“Tertullian speaks of ustricles (from urere — to burn), female delipators who made use of boiling dropax to burn the hairs on the legs and other parts of the body of these voluptuaries. Other references to these effeminate practices — particularly that of depilating the body-pile with dropax or psilothrum (melted rosin in oil) or with tweezers — are made by Persius, Ausonius, Juvenal, Martial, Suetonius, Quintilian, Julius Capitolinus, Pliny, Aeitus"

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons and “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated November 2024


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