Wig

• 1. Introduction

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  Wealthy Egyptians topped their wigs with cones of scented animal fat, held everything in place with beeswax and resin, and wore the whole arrangement over heads that had been deliberately shaved clean to escape the desert sun. A wig, at its simplest, is a head covering made from human or animal hair, or a synthetic copy of it, and the word itself is short for 'periwig'. People have worn them to disguise baldness, to change how they look, or because a job required it, from a Broadway stage to a courtroom bench. How did a solution to sunburn in ancient Egypt end up mandatory at the 17th century French court, and then banned by decree in 18th century Korea? And why would a British prime minister end up taxing the powder that went on top of a wig rather than the wig itself?

• 2. Ancient Wigs Across Cultures

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  In Egyptian society, both men and women commonly kept their heads clean-shaven or close-cropped and wore wigs over them as a matter of course. Assyrians, Phoenicians, Jews in ancient Israel and Judea, Greeks, and Romans all treated wigs as everyday fashion as well. In China, wigs became popular starting in the Spring and Autumn period, while in Japan the upper classes had already adopted them before the Nara period began. In Korea, an elaborate style of wig called gache was popular among women through the Goryeo dynasty, until the government banned the style in the late 18th century.

• 3. The Wig's Long Revival

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  After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, wigs disappeared from Western fashion for roughly a thousand years, only returning in the 16th century as a way to compensate for hair loss or to improve someone's appearance. Christian ideals of modesty discouraged elaborate cosmetic practices in the meantime, and married women in particular were expected to cover their hair with veils or wimples rather than wear a hairpiece. Where hairpieces did appear during this long gap, they were often just false tresses attached to a cap or net rather than full wigs, sometimes stitched onto poorly fitted leather caps of human or animal hair. There was also a practical motive: shaving the head and replacing natural hair with an easily de-loused artificial piece cut down on head lice in an era of poor hygiene, much as fur hoods served a similar preventive purpose.

  Royal example did the real work of reviving the wig. Queen Elizabeth I wore a tightly curled red wig styled in what was called a 'Roman' fashion, and among men, King Louis XIII began wearing wigs in 1624 after going prematurely bald. His son and successor, Louis XIV, who reigned from 1638 to 1715, spread the fashion across Europe and European-influenced countries through the 1660s. Wig-wearing then stayed dominant among men for about 140 years, until the French Revolution's changes to dress in the 1790s brought it to an end.

• 4. Plague and Periwigs

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  When Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660 after his exile in France, he brought French styles with him, including the periwig, shoulder-length or longer, echoing the long hair men had already favored since the 1620s. The London diarist Samuel Pepys captured the era's ambivalence about wigs. On the 27th of March 1663, he described visiting his old periwig-maker Jervas, who brought him a wig 'full of nits', forcing Pepys to send it back to be cleaned. Wigs of the period were expensive, extraordinarily elaborate, covering the back and shoulders, and often uncomfortable, and the best examples used natural human hair, though horse and goat hair served as cheaper substitutes. A wigmakers' guild formed in France in 1665, a model soon copied elsewhere in Europe, and demand for wigs made wigmaking a prestigious trade.

  Not everyone approved. Puritans in particular criticized wigs as making men look deformed and emasculated, and during outbreaks of plague, rumors circulated that some wigs were made from the hair of plague victims. Keeping a wig clean required fuller's earth, and the powder used to freshen it was made from low-grade flour scented with pomatum.

• 5. The Powder Tax

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  In the 18th century, men powdered their wigs white or off-white, while women of the period did not wear full wigs at all, instead supplementing their own hair with artificial pieces. The elaborate wigs worn at George III's coronation in 1761 were mocked by the artist William Hogarth in his engraving Five Orders of Periwigs. By 1765, wig-wearing had fallen out of everyday fashion except among certain occupations, such as coachmen and lawyers, though many men still powdered their natural hair to resemble a wig. Fashion swung back extravagantly during the Macaroni period of the 1770s. Women powdered their hair grey or blue-grey rather than the bright white men wore, using powder scented with orange flower, lavender or orris root and occasionally tinted violet, blue, pink or yellow.

  By the 1780s, young men had begun lightly powdering their own natural hair rather than wearing full wigs, following a trend women had already set in the 1770s. After 1790, wigs and powder were mostly reserved for older, more conservative men, and English women largely stopped powdering their hair. In 1795, British prime minister William Pitt the Younger levied a tax of one guinea per year on hair powder, a move that effectively ended the fashion for both wigs and powder. Writing from Paris in the winter of 1796, the diplomat Granville Leveson-Gower noted that hair powder had become so common there that 'the appearance of the people was less democratic than in England.' In the French court at Versailles, elaborate themed wigs such as the so-called 'boat poufs' had been fashionable among women in the mid-to-late 18th century, weighted down with pomades and ornamentation, but they became symbols of aristocratic decadence and fell out of fashion at the start of the French Revolution in 1789.

• 6. Wigs of Power and Rank

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  Four American presidents, from John Adams to James Monroe, wore curly powdered wigs tied in a queue while in office, following the old-fashioned 18th century style. Thomas Jefferson wore a powdered wig only rarely and stopped entirely soon after becoming president in 1801. John Quincy Adams wore a powdered wig in his youth but abandoned it while serving as U.S. Minister to Russia between 1809 and 1814, long before he became president in 1825, and William Henry Harrison wore one during his early military service in the 1790s. George Washington, the first president, never wore a wig at all; he simply powdered, curled and tied back his own long hair. Women's wigs took longer to catch on and were worn only surreptitiously at first; by the early 20th century they were mostly limited to older women who had lost their hair, a fact the 1944 film Mr. Skeffington used for pathos, dressing Bette Davis's character in a wig after a bout of diphtheria.

  The tradition of official wigs survived longest in the legal world. Bishops of the Church of England and the Church of Ireland wore ceremonial wigs until 1823, and barristers and judges across the Commonwealth continued wearing them in styles that date to the late 18th century, with judges' everyday wigs shorter than the full-bottomed versions worn on ceremonial occasions. Hong Kong barristers and judges still wear wigs as a legacy of British rule. In July 2007, judges in New South Wales, Australia, voted to stop wearing wigs in that state's Court of Appeal, and New Zealand lawyers and judges now wear them only for ceremonial occasions, such as when new lawyers are called to the bar. In Canada, lawyers and judges do not wear wigs at all.

  Military officers of the late 17th to early 19th centuries wore wigs suited more to a European drawing room than a battlefield, following civilian styles from full-bottomed natural-colored wigs down to the shorter, powdered pigtail styles of the early 18th century, though the elaborate court fashions of the late 1700s never made it into the field. Ordinary infantry soldiers could not afford wigs at all, so armies improvised: British soldiers of the 1740s greased their own long hair with tallow, fashioned it into pigtails tied back into the scalp hair, and dusted it with powdered chalk to fake the look of a powdered wig. The Prussian army under Frederick the Great took this to an extreme, with soldiers wearing a single long pigtail reaching nearly to the waist. The Russian statesman Grigory Potemkin scrapped the practice in the 1780s, replacing his soldiers' tight uniforms and powdered wigs with short, natural hairstyles. In the United States Army, soldiers wore powdered wigs tied in a queue until 1801, when the senior officer James Wilkinson ordered the practice ended, a move so unpopular it triggered desertions and threats of resignation.

• 7. Building a Wig by Hand

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  Making a custom wig begins with measuring the client's head, arranging their natural hair in flat curls and tracing the hairline with a pattern of transparent tape over plastic wrap, before transferring those measurements to a wooden or cork-stuffed canvas form called a 'block'. There are two basic ways to attach hair to a wig. The older method weaves the root ends of hair onto three silk threads to form a fringe called a 'weft', which is then sewn onto a net foundation, a job increasingly done by sewing machine. A newer, 19th century method uses a small tool called a 'ventilating needle' or 'knotting needle' to knot a few strands of hair at a time directly onto the foundation, producing a lighter, more natural-looking wig favored for film and theatrical work; fine, flesh-colored 'hair lace' at the front of theatrical wigs creates the illusion that hair is growing straight from the scalp.

  Natural hair for a wig, whether human or from an animal like a goat or yak, must be carefully sorted so every strand points the same direction, since a hair's scale-like cuticle will tangle and mat if turned the wrong way; this sorting process is called 'turning'. Cheaper wigs skip it in favor of 'processing', treating the hair with a strong base solution that partially dissolves the cuticle before bleaching, dyeing and coating it with a synthetic resin finish. It takes roughly six heads of hair to make one full human hair wig. The highest quality is Remy hair, in which the cuticles stay intact and aligned in one direction, reducing tangling; most human hair wigs use hair sourced from China or India, while hair from Russia or Northern Europe is considered the rarest and most expensive.

  By the 21st century, wigmaking had grown into a billion dollar industry built on three stages: collecting the raw material, manufacturing, and distribution. India supplies most of the world's human hair, and reports have described women there being pressured by their husbands to sell their hair, and children in slums being tricked into having their heads shaved in exchange for toys; scrap pickers gather additional hair from brushes, clothing and trash. China handles most of the sorting and construction of finished wigs, which are then exported abroad, with the United States and the United Kingdom the largest destination markets.

• 8. Wigs in Everyday Life

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  On Broadway, wigs give performers a fixed look night after night, letting an actor's hairstyle stay consistent even as their own hair changes day to day, and they double as a way to hide a hidden microphone pack, often placed on the actor's head for quick costume changes. Celebrities including Dolly Parton, Cher, Tina Turner, Diana Ross and the Supremes and Raquel Welch have long used wigs as a signature part of their look, and wigs remain common at Halloween in the form of inexpensive 'rubber wigs'.

  Protective styling, wearing a wig to shield natural hair from damage while still allowing a different look, is one common everyday reason people wear wigs, since a wig can be styled ahead of time rather than redone each morning. Others wear wigs because they are losing hair to chemotherapy or to alopecia areata. Jewish law calls for married women to cover their hair for reasons of tzniut, or modesty, and Orthodox Jewish women who choose to do so with a wig call it a sheitel, often made of human hair among Haredi and Hasidic Jews; some rabbis have argued that covering the hair with a wig defeats the purpose, since an attractive wig can draw more attention than a woman's own hair would. A merkin, meanwhile, is a pubic wig, worn as a decorative or theatrical item and sometimes for comic effect.