Live And Let Dye

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The Chapel Hairdressing

A determination to alter the colour of our hair has been part of humankind's beauty ritual since the dawn of time. And if you think sitting patiently for hours in the colourist's chair to get those ombre tints meticulously applied is going the full distance in the cause of fabulous hair - then here's a short rundown of some of the lengths our ancestors went to in pursuit of adding that essential extra bling to their barnets.

Rewind to Ancient Rome, and it turns out that citizens preferred blonds way before gentlemen. Back here two-thousand years ago you'd find the empire's wealthiest women frantically powdering their hair with gold dust in an attempt to lighten up while reaffirming their status - and all because the naturally golden locks of slave girls brought back from the freshly conquered region of Gaul were stirring the loins of randy roman males.

Differences aside, ageing roman's of both sexes were equally fond of covering their 'bits of grey', and one of the most popular recipes for a black 'dye-over' involved dissolving leeches in vinegar and allowing the mixture to ferment for several months before applying it to hair and letting it bake in the sun. Meanwhile over in Egypt they preferred the far more sensible method of darkening hair with a mixture of oil and the blood of a black cat...

At this point it's probably worth mentioning that several millennia before Egypt and Rome were even established, the first use of the natural red dye extracted from the leaves of the henna tree was recorded, by the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq). To this day, Henna continues to be used on the hair and skin of people across the globe, but that's all much too normal...

So it's good to know that centuries later things hadn't got a lot more palatable, as proved when the great Renaissance painter Titian helped popularise an idealised image of voluptuous women with burnished red-gold hair, and the ladies of 16th century Venice attempted to emulating the shade by applying a charming concoction of sulphur, soda and rhubarb.

Two centuries later the men of Europe demonstrated even less restraint in the vanity stakes. As hair powdered in white and pastel shades reached the peak of its popularity in the 1700s it was estimated that the baking flour so wantonly used for this purpose, by the British Army alone, could have made 50,000 loaves for the poor.

By 1839 the perfumier Jules Hauel began selling a range of vegetable-based hair dyes from his store in Philadelphia. Derived from natural plant extracts such as henna, indigo and cassia, these would have offered a far friendlier set of hair colouring options - had they not been mixed with bear grease, which was commonly used as a hair conditioner.

On the bright side, having been discovered in 1818, hydrogen peroxide was being regularly used to bleach hair by the end of this century, as the world cheerfully embarked on the first of it's ever growing catalogue of burnt scalp injuries.

If you think anything's changed today, think again. We're as ready to go to mad lengths for crazy coloured hair as we ever were. This can be proved perfectly by the Dinka, tribal herds-people who live on islands in Southern Sudan's portion of the Nile river basin. Anyone who's recently watched the TV documentary series Walking The Nile (Sunday's, 9pm, Channel 4), will already know that the men of the tribe can't get enough of the groovy orange shade their tight black curls turn - so long as they regularly shower their heads in their cattle's urine...

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