Roman Wigs Research Paper

Ancient Greek
In this era, the hair dressing industry had a popularity boom, where lots of people from upper classes often visited public barber shops or had slaves whose job was just focused on maintaining their hair. In ancient Greece, your natural hair was sacred. So sacred that at funerals mourners left pieces of their own hair on the dead and Greeks hanged the hair of the dead on their front doors. So wigs weren’t used in this time period however hair styles from ancient Greece did inspire later generations to wear their wigs with braids.

Roman Empire
Wigs and hair pieces in this era were very popular among women. Hair pieces were used to add lots of volume as they made the hair look thicker and longer and were sometimes coloured. There were 2 types of roman wigs. The first was a full wig called a capillamentum. The full wig was very good for convenience as they could be directly pinned onto the head which meant people
These wigs would be heavily powered with long ringlets that would dangle away from the face and be decorated with garlands feathers and bows for women. Men would tie these wigs back with a black bow. To create a tall structure to the wigs the hair was styled over a cage frame or horse hair pads. In this time the higher you could get your hair to go the higher your status was. It was the same for how many wigs you owned, the more you had equated to how wealthy and celebrated you were. Some men and women took decorating and styling their wigs/hair pieces to the extreme by creating bird cages/nest or adding a model ship onto their hair. Due to these tall and intricate detail in these wigs, creating and styling one took hours however that also meant that a couple weeks could go past without the hair getting messed up but because the hair was heavily powdered and had horsehair padding it attracted lots of nesting mice and other