Hairdresser by day; Archaeologist by night
I hadn’t had a haircut in over 8 months and it was becoming more obvious. Finally, one morning I was so disgusted I booked an appointment with the closest hair salon that had an opening on a Sunday afternoon.
Normally, I don’t like talking to stylists. We rarely have anything in common and an hour of small talk is exhausting. But this day was was different. I got lucky and was paired with a Hair Designer named Janet Stephens, who it turns out is also a part-time hairdressing archaeologist.
Her story of how she became an authority on ancient roman hairdressing was absolutely fascinating. One day she was in the Walters Art Museum waiting for her daughter’s music lesson to end. The museum curators must’ve been doing some rearranging or cleaning, and had brought the busts from the Roman Empire exhibit down from the high shelves and had exhibited them as standing displays in the center of the room. In this presentation a 360 deg view of the heads was possible, and Janet found herself examining the intricate hairstyles carved into the back of the busts’ heads.
Intrigued by the varied designs, she went home and tried to recreate them on manikins. But she couldn’t quite get them right using modern hair dressing tools. Still she wasn’t discouraged, and continued researching the topic, going as far as connecting with experts in the field of roman archaeology, and translating ancient Latin texts herself. In one text, she translated a line that used the Latin word for “sow” in the context of hair dressing. The academic community had interpreted this word as “to sow” in the figurative sense. However, since she wasn’t researching from the perspective of an academic, she took its meaning in the literal sense and found herself back at the manikin, literally sowing braids of hair into intricate designs using needle and thread. In this method, she was finally able to recreate ancient Roman hairstyles.
It turns out her research was groundbreaking. Before her discoveries not much research had been done on Roman hairstyles and there wasn’t much documentation available. The prevailing thought had been that Roman hairdressers had depended on wigs. Since the ancient art of wig making has been mostly lost to human memory, stylists had been attempting to create these hairstyles using modern tools and never quite getting the right look.
Anyways, she now has a series of Youtube videos that teaches people how to recreate ancient Roman hairstyles, and her findings have been published in a few academic journals, including the Journal of Roman Archaeology.
Watch one of her instructional videos below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs9fLwm-9-k]
