hair

hair is present in differing degrees on all mammals, and its most important function in those other than human is to conserve body heat by insulating against cold. Humans are the most hairless of all mammals, and yet hair occupies a central place in human development and sense of self. Whether it is the gradual decrease of hair leading to male baldness, the loss of pigment leading to white or grey hairs and signalling the onset of middle age, or the adolescent desire for the pubic hair that signals approaching adulthood, hair often tells others something about our place in culture.

Hair types and styles have, at various times, in various countries and on various continents, come to be associated with definitions of race, the possibility of being or becoming the right kind of woman, with radicalism or revolution, and with the right to occupy a particular social space in a class hierarchy. While often discussed as a personal statement of style or fashion, humanity's relationship to hair is far more complicated.

During the monarchy in France, the prince's hair, for example, was never cut — it was curled and pampered. Rastafarian followers of the early twentieth-century Ethiopian religious leader Haile Selassie not only refused to cut theirs, but were forbidden to comb it either. Early records indicate that the ancient Egyptians, men and women alike, shaved their hair off and wore wigs. Prostitutes in Nazi Germany were forced to shave off their hair so they could be easily identified and shamed. In the post-war period, women who had collaborated with the Nazis were similarly forced to shave their heads. Delila cut off Samson's long hair so that she could strip him of his fabled strength and power. As a sign of respect for the law and British custom, judges and lawyers during America's colonial period wore powdered wigs over their natural hair. Rapunzel let her hair cascade out of a window and down a tower so that Prince Charming might climb up and rescue her from imprisonment. Among the Yoruba people, hair signifies aesthetic value; and for East African pastoral peoples, such as the Pokot and Samburu, its styling indicates age status. A 1970s American Broadway musical, Hair, received numerous awards and set records for attendance.

Individual human hairs vary in colour, diameter, and contour. The different colours result from variations in the amount, distribution, and type of melanin pigment in them, as well as from variations in surface structure that cause light to be reflected in different ways. Hairs may be coarse, or so thin and colourless as to be nearly invisible. Straight hairs are round in cross section, while wavy hairs are alternately oval and round; very curly and kinky hairs are shaped like twisted ribbons. During the nineteenth century, renowned social scientists posited relationships between some of these variations in hair type and intelligence, or the potential for civilized behaviour, and indeed, in some instances, saw them as a marker of humanness.

In his 1848 Natural History of the Human Species, Charles Hamilton Smith, for example, suggested that hair type is crucial for defining the three typical ‘stocks’, or races, of mankind: the bearded Caucasian, the beardless Mongolian, and the woolly-haired Negro. His work included a chart which positions the ‘woolly-haired’ at the base of a triangular hierarchy and the Caucasians at the apex. Smith's ‘woolly-haired race’ became a metaphor for African physical traits which served prima facie as evidence of racial difference, such as mental ‘lack’, and as a justification for slavery and racial discrimination. The lingering effects of such pseudo-scientific theories may help to explain why people of African descent continue to spend billions of dollars each year trying chemically to alter the texture of their hair in order to make it straight, as opposed to ‘woolly’.

Each hair grows from a hair follicle in the deep layer of the skin. There are different types of hair at different stages in life, and in different parts of the body. The first to develop is the lanugo, a layer of downy, slender hairs that begin growing in the third or fourth month of fetal life and are entirely shed either before or shortly after birth. During the first few months of infancy appears fine, short, unpigmented hairs called down hair, or vellus. Vellus covers every part of the body except the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, undersurfaces of the fingers and toes, and a few other places. At and following puberty, this hair is supplemented by longer, coarser, more heavily pigmented hair, called terminal hair, that develops in the armpits, genital regions, and, in males, on the face and sometimes on parts of the trunk and limbs. The growth and the distribution of hair are under the influence of the sex hormones. The hair of the scalp, eyebrows, and eyelashes are of separate type and develop fairly early in life. On the scalp, where hair is usually densest and longest, the average total number of hairs is between 100 000 and 150 000. Human hair grows at a rate of 10–13 mm/month. While hair texture and type was of importance for nineteenth-century social scientists in the shaping of racial hierarchies, for middle-class women in Christian countries, hair length has been important in the shaping of hierarchies of femininity. In part due to a passage in the King James version of the Bible (‘if a woman have long hair, it is Glory to Her’ 1 Cor: 11–15), such women the world over have often been urged by society at large, and by patriarchs in their individual households, to wear their hair in long, precisely styled hair-dos that they refrained from cutting. During the Victorian period the long, elaborately-styled hairdos favoured by the middle classes signalled wealth, leisure time, and modesty (it was almost impossible for a woman to fix her hair in one of the fashionable styles without the paid help of a hairdresser, and the styling could often take three hours or more). During the 1920s, women who ‘bobbed’ or cut their hair to ear length caused a furore in Europe and the US. The new hair style, which went hand in hand with shockingly at, or above, the knee skirt lengths was seen as immodest and outside of prevailing standards of decency. This was true in part because bobbed hair was immediately favoured by women in the ‘world's oldest profession’ due to its ease of care.

By the late 1960s, long hair came to be back in vogue amongst male and female youth in America. However, far from being a return to the earlier ideals of propriety often associated with long hair, lengthy hair now denoted a counter culture or radical stance in both white and black communities. One of the surest ways for white teenagers and young adults to identify themselves as in rebellion against prevailing middle-class ideals and culture, and governmental political strategies, was to wear their hair in the long, straight styles favoured by hippies, flower children, and political activists. During this same period afros came to be a popular style in African–American communities. The afro was understood to denote black pride, which became synonymous with black nationalism, activism, and a radical political consciousness. This sentiment moved sharply against the prevailing integrationist ideology and evidenced a belief that the gains of the Civil Rights Movement were not broad-based enough, and was a style favoured by radical groups like the Black Panthers.

In addition to the presence or absence of hair, hair texture and styling have played a long and important role in human history. It is not clear just why hair has come to mean so very much to so many people, but there is no mistaking the important role that hair has played in the process of identifying a relationship to a particular culture or subculture. Hair can lead to acceptance or rejection by certain groups and social classes, and its styling can enhance or detract from career advancement. What many envision as a personal statement is also implicated in an intricate web of religious and social politics.

Noliwe Rooks

See also baldness; sex hormones; skin.