The Return of the Beehives, Brylcreem and Botanical!

An
Historical Review of Hair Care Practices with a view to
Opportunities for Sustainable Design
HIELSCHER, Sabine, FISHER, Tom and COOPER, Tim
Available from Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at:
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HIELSCHER, Sabine, FISHER, Tom and COOPER, Tim (2009). The Return of the
Beehives, Brylcreem and Botanical! An Historical Review of Hair Care Practices with
a view to Opportunities for Sustainable Design. In: Undisciplined! Design Research
Society Conference 2008, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK, 16-19 July
2008.

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Undisciplined! Proceedings of the Design Research Society Conference 2008

The Return of the Beehives, Brylcreem and Botanical!

An Historical Review of Hair Care Practices with a view to Opportunities
for Sustainable Design

Sabine Hielscher, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom

Dr Tom Fisher, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom
Dr Tim Cooper, Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

Abstract
This paper considers hair care as a network of activities and routines which
have consequences for environmental sustainability and which may be
modified by design. It proposes that together with cultural knowledge,
embodied skill and objects, these activities can be thought of as ‘practices’
that are reproduced and also change through time (Shove 2006). They
consume resources and are therefore implicated in the issue of environmental
sustainability.
The paper draws on research into hair care practices conducted through in-
depth interviews with female participants, as part of the first author’s PhD
study. The discussion here however centres on historical work and Shove’s
(2003) writing on bathing to explore the changing products and substances
including ideas, technological and infrastructural aspects of cleansing and
conditioning hair. Because these factors may determine when to wash or not
to wash your hair they affect resource consumption.
The paper concludes by outlining opportunities for sustainable design that
follow from the insights gained by investigating the history of hair care in
relation to the data collected during in-depth interviews. It highlights, as
outlined by Hand et al (2005), that the resources consumed through hair care
are influenced by the integrative nature of hair care as a practice rather than
by individuals being dedicated to sustainability.
To concentrate on single products without taking into account that hair care
is practiced in everyday life is not likely to provide opportunities for sustainable
living. What is considered ‘normal’ standards of hair care and means to
achieve them needs to be conceptualised to identify opportunities to modify
what is considered ‘normal’ through design.

Keywords
Everyday Practices, Sustainable Design

Hair is visible – we manipulate it to show others who we are. Hair identifies us

by announcing our age, gender, religious beliefs, occupation, politics and
other aspects of life. Hairstyles, advertisements and products form symbolic
systems, creating a series of signs legible to those in our social groups. Mass
media, product advertising and celebrities play an increasingly influential role
in determining hairstyle trends and fashion. Historical work on hair often
reflects this by documenting historical developments of styles and their

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interpretations in a particular period of time. These ‘spectacular’ aspects of

the ways we ‘do’ hair are relevant to understanding hair care, but they do not
represent the full story. Much of what we do with our hair we do in private as
part of a network of everyday routines and habits – it is anything but
spectacular, even though the results may be. What we do with our hair is
determined by competences, knowledge, past experiences and temporal,
sensual, contextual and emotional arrangements of everyday life; it can be
thought of as a ‘practice’ in the sense that deCerteau, and Bourdieu use the
word (DeCerteau 1984, Bourdieu, 1977). These daily practices can consist of
taken-for-granted routines that are often so built-in in our everyday life that we
hardly ever reflect upon them but these ideas and products create ‘normal’
standards of what there is to be cared for and the means to achieve them.
These hair care routines consume resources and therefore are implicated in
the issue of environmental sustainability. Showering and bathing accounts for
17%-18% of UK daily domestic water consumption - on average we spend
seven to eight minutes under a power shower that pumps out between
twenty and fifty litres a minute. These figures account for only part of the
environmental impact of hair care as they omit the energy consumed to heat
the water or to power hair care appliances and the waste produced from
used packaging and unwanted appliances. Whatever its precise level, the
amount of resources used in hair care is not a ‘given’, indeed Shove has
demonstrated that our current daily showering habit displaced the traditional
British bath. (Shove 2003)
Past sustainable design strategies often disregarded the environmental and
social implications of products in the use phase, concentrating instead on
technical innovations (Sherwin et al 1998). Such design strategies for
sustainability emphasise improving the environmental profile of products
through, for instance, design for disassembly and enhanced efficiency, but as
Demi notes, these should not be the only focus as they ignore the more
slippery phase of use - for example everyday habits with hair (Fletcher et al
2001). Where designers have started to engage with the use phase by
considering consumer behaviour, approaches are often solution-based;
designers interpret and develop a design strategy and try to apply it to a
certain context instead of being more explorative and considering if the
strategy is actually appropriate for the context. These solution-based
strategies apply so called product focused or result focused approaches
(Fletcher et al 2001). While they sometimes address ways of satisfying needs
these are often questioned in relation to lifestyles and behaviours on the
ground of values and attitudes rather than patterns that determine habits and
routines.

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This paper draws on the first author’s PhD study1 that is undertaken in
collaboration with Boots the Chemist UK in order to investigate relationships
between the elements that constitute the practice of hair care at home in
order to develop opportunities for sustainable design. The study is based on in-
depth interviews with 24 women and 12 hair care expert interviews, as well as
a review of historical work on hair. It draws its analytical framework from
Shove’s (2003) writing on bathing and theories of social practice.
To work within the constraints of a short paper, we here mainly explore ideas,
routines, products and substances over time around cleansing and
conditioning to inform the investigation of everyday hair care as reported by
the participants. By looking back in time, designers may find frameworks for
thinking about design contexts in a new light in what Wright et al call a
‘conceptual re-positioning of the design problem’ (Wright et al 2006) and
which Buchanan (1992) refers to as a ‘doctrine of placements’. Indeed,
multidisciplinary approaches encourage the designer’s generative thinking
and the creation of innovative, sensitive and meaningful concepts. This
discovery-orientated process has been further advocated by Satchell (2003)
who stresses the use of cultural theory as a lens for analysing qualitative data
in design. The purpose of the paper therefore is not to provide a definitive
history of hair care, as historical and cultural studies of hair already exist, but to
draw on these for inspiration to engage with the interview data, explore
consequences for resource use and identify opportunities for sustainable
design. Hairstyles are the final outcome of practices that reflect processes,
activities, skills, ideas and products used; it is these processes that are the main
focus of this study not their results.
Here, ‘doing things with hair’ is seen as a network of activities that, together
with cultural knowledge, embodied skill and objects, form a particular set of
practices that reproduce and change through time (Shove 2006). Shove
draws on sociological and anthropological studies of technology to highlight
the limitations of analysing objects and their acquisition in isolation without
investigation the ‘reconfiguration of ideas, actions and habits’ connected
with their use and appropriation. In her analysis she relates our bathing habits
to the domestic technical arrangements we live with every day, the
infrastructure that provides us with the means to make these arrangements
work and, crucially, the very powerful sets of ideas that motivate us to clean
ourselves in the particular ways that we do. What is notable in her account is
the coherence with which she integrates these elements of bathing and
traces the ways in which they change over time. Extending Shove’s insight, this
paper recommends that we think more systemically about the relation
between consumption, provision and practice to create ideas for sustainable
living where the activity of designing exceeds the professional realm of a

1
The empirical research design of the first author’s PhD is explorative in the organisation of the
research, hence building on qualitative methods for the production of data and comprising a
non-representative sample. In the study the in-depth interviews have a flexible and interactive
nature and are based on open-ended questions and probes. These are used to investigate
multi-relational elements of everyday hair care – how the women interact with everyday things
including the dynamics of their cultural and physical environments. The sample consists of 24
women between the ages of eighteen to sixty-nine with varying attitudes, motivations,
understandings, practical competences, and degrees of involvement in relation to hair care
and hair care experts such as employees at Boots the Chemist and hairdressers.

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solely product-focused approach as designers investigate opportunities that

go beyond the point of sale.
The paper offers an initial analysis of the nature of cleansing and conditioning
hair in particular what is considered ‘clean’ hair and the means to achieve
and detect it. The paper will start by introducing the practice of cleansing and
conditioning hair with a brief reflection on their history. This is followed by an
exploration into the ideas about what needs to be cleansed out of hair,
drawing on Mary Douglas’ (1984) conceptualisation of pollution and dirt. This
allows an investigation into how ‘hair that needs to be dealt with’ is detected
and evaluated for its acceptability. This introduces a discussion of ideas of
‘good’ and ‘bad’ grease that influence frequencies of washing hair, affecting
resource use. The later part of the paper, investigates how people have dealt
with hair including available tools and substances such as powder, shampoo
and brushes that are based on varying resource intensive practices. This
highlights a development from practices that concentrated on moving
grease that was taken to be a healthy product of the head to removing it
and enhancing ‘condition’ through adding another substance; conditioner.
Here, the paper will particularly draw on Hand’s et al (2005) study of
showering and bathing.
Because the paper presents part of work in progress it is not possible to state
definitive results or design concepts. However, it concludes by summarising
the insights gained for sustainable design opportunities and discussing the
usefulness of examining the history of hair care in relation to the data
collected during the in-depth interviews. It highlights that notions of what it is
to be normal and acceptable needs to be conceptualised when thinking
about sustainable design. When thinking about research into design, hair care
might be an unusual context to study, as traditionally designers are only
involved in developing of packaging for hair care products, but this paper
proposes that design might have a significant role when thinking about hair
care in relation to sustainability.

Cleansing and conditioning

According to the Mintel study Shampoo and Conditioner 2007, 25% of women
wash their hair everyday, 59% two-three times a week, 16.5% once a week or
less. During in-depth interviews women mentioned numerous rationales for
washing or not washing their hair. These can be grouped into three concepts:
‘cleansing’, ‘pressures of time’ and ‘creating a new canvas’. ‘Creating a new
canvas’ equates to ideas of styling. Of these three, this paper concentrates
on cleansing.
‘Clean’ means an absence of dirt. While this is a simple matter it is less simple
to define what constitutes dirt, as the discussion below will indicate. In the hair,
dirt can include dust, grease, pollution and smells. The intentions behind
cleansing have included to promote health, to avoid odour, to enhance
beauty and social acceptance. At the beginning of the 21st Century the
resources used to cleanse and condition hair include synthetic detergent
shampoos, conditioners and hot water from either a shower or bath.
Shampoos cleanse the hair and scalp but they might ‘over-cleanse’, making
conditioners necessary. The idea of modern chemical conditioner is to leave
the hair ‘conditioned’ without making it heavy and greasy by smoothing the

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cuticle that is the outside layer of the hair, making it shiny (Draelos 2005,
Kinsely 2003). In contemporary practice, cleansing and conditioning consist of
a sequence of interdependent steps and stages such as wetting hair,
squeezing shampoo into hands, rubbing it in the hands, massaging it into the
scalp, rinsing it off with water, squeezing conditioner into hands, rubbing it in
the hands, massaging it into the hair ends, distributing it with the comb,
waiting for a few minutes before rinsing it off. Depending on the women’s2
routine these steps and stages might be part of the evening bathing routine or
morning showering routine. This list highlights the fact that cleansing and
shampooing means women interact with a range of tools, facilities and fluids
whilst carrying out a variety of activities in relationship to particular parts of our
body.
This was not always the case. Access and availability to the products,
appliances and substances that were gradually introduced during the
twentieth century was not complete in UK homes until the 1960s. Piped water
was provided to UK cities from the 1880s, but it was not until 1930s that most
middle class homes were supplied with hot and running water and the 1950s
for many working class homes (Hand et al 2005). Synthetic detergent
shampoos were first developed during the 1930s but still had some
shortcomings. The technology behind the products we use today was not
introduced until the 1960s. Over the centuries women used a variety of
different substances such as powders to dry-shampoo their hair. During the
sixteenth to the seventeenth century women wiped the hair with sponges
immersed in scented water and powder before combing it each day. At the
beginning of the twentieth century the practice of dry-shampooing was
accomplished by the use of either petrol or Carbon tetrachloride as a
cleansing agent both of which resulted in fatal accidents. Petrol massaged
into the hair could easily ignite if anything warm was around whilst Carbon
tetrachloride is similar to chloroform and only to be used in ventilated places.
As soap became more available it was promoted with the slogan3 that one
bar would suit all possible uses including washing your body, hair, clothes and
dishes. The use of soap for cleansing the hair never got well established, as it
was difficult to rinse and dulled the hair (Cox 1999).
This brief history demonstrates a co-evolution of technological, chemical and
infrastructural, i.e. material, elements of cleansing hair that have influenced
hair care practice as they have become available to a wider market, more
safely to use and more ‘efficient’ in cleansing hair. Nevertheless, it fails to
reveal the whole picture of how practices of cleansing have developed into
what we now consider a ‘normal’ practice. Next to products and substances
a practice is comprised of ideas and routines and in the case of hair these
include questions such as what is there to be cleaned and the appropriate
means of dealing with it that affect resource use. The influence of ideas on
cleanliness routines is demonstrated in historical practices of bathing. During
the sixteenth and seventeenth century, people rarely immersed themselves in

2
As this study has focused on women, the paper will refer to women instead of the more
generic term of people. Some of the points suggested might not be gender specific. However,
this would need to be further explored in a study that would include men and women.
3
The 1924 Ivory soap slogan was: ‘Why buy a soap for toilet and bath, another for shampooing,
another for fine laundry, a fourth for dishes, and a fifth for general laundry, when Ivory will fulfil
all these needs?’ (http://siris-collections.si.edu/search/results.jsp?q=Ivory+soap+1924&x=0&y=0)

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water as the skin was considered to be porous. If fully covered by water, fluids
could ‘leak out’ and dangerous substances could leak in. Furthermore, at the
beginning of the 20th Century although the government promoted cleanliness
in persuading people to wash their hair more regularly this did not increase the
washing of hair, because popular belief connected getting the hair wet with
poor health. During this era women did usually have long and thick hair that
needed time to dry and without hairdryers people felt more susceptible to
colds and fevers if their hair was wet. (Hand et al 2005, Cox 1999, Sherrow 2006,
Vigarello 1988)

Origins of grease – what needs to be cleansed and how is it

detected?
Hair is nonliving. The hair outside the scalp has no blood, nerves and muscles.
On the other hand, it has got some attributes that make women believe the
opposite, as each hair is connected to a follicle within the scalp with its own
muscles. The look, feel and smell of hair constantly changes through women
manipulating it, through external influences such as the weather and the
indoor environment and through its own production of sebum. This oily
substance, commonly referred to either as ‘grease’ or ‘natural oils’, is
produced by the sebaceous glands and is made of fat and debris from dead
fat-producing cells. It is odourless but its bacterial breakdown can produce
smells. Sebum removes static electricity, protects and waterproofs the hair
and therefore keeps it from becoming dry and brittle. Like sweat and the fungi
and bacteria that live on the skin, sebum is close to us, almost ‘internal’ as it is
produced by our bodies. Its effect on the feel, look and smell of our hair,
influences our decisions to wash or not to wash it and consequently the
amount of resources consumed (Draelos 2005). There are also external
elements that can influence the hair and scalp such as nits, environmental dirt,
dust, pollution and ‘product build-up’ from styling products. Throughout history
the question of what there is to be cleaned from hair has emphasized a
variety of ‘acceptable’ quantities and types of dirt, ways of detecting it and
dealing with it.
Before the 19th Century people lived in relatively unsanitary living conditions
with open sewers and in unventilated houses. People of the lower class who
were the majority, often did hard and strenuous work. Their living conditions
encouraged scalp infections, diseases and head lice. During industrialisation,
the atmosphere of England’s industrial towns was polluted - the buildings the
rain and people’s hair were smoke-blackened. Smut could fall from a clear
sky if the wind was right. The growth of industry and of population resulted in
an increase in ‘dirt’ that led at the beginning of the 20th century to a variety of
public health acts, including an emphasis on cleansing hair. Environmental
conditions have improved considerably over the last century, reducing the
effects of pollution, dirt and diseases and it might be possible to suggest that
external influences on hair have become more ‘invisible’ but they are still of
concern nowadays – dirt from outside still needs to be cleansed from the hair.
One of the participants suggested that you need to wash your hair, ‘if you
have been to the city centre and your hair feels like it is full of pollution and
things like that or you have been to the pub and it is full of smoke’ (Participant
2).

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Dant (2004) argues that people are pragmatic when it comes to dirt, ‘if they
can see it, it is dirt or if they can smell it, it is dirt’. They use their senses to make
decisions on what has to be done to remove the ‘dirt’. If this were so one
would expect that the greater ‘invisibility’ of external influences on the look,
feel and smell of hair would result in less frequent washes, but this is not the
case. In the 1950s women washed their hair not more than once a week,
whereas nowadays frequent washes during the week are the norm (Cox 2005).
Dirt does not need to be visible to our senses to be concerning - women
report the existence of more ‘invisible dirt’. They detect dirt through
knowledge, touch and sight. Smells, which may once have betrayed the
need to clean the hair, are mainly linked to choosing products, in particular
when trying to make a distinction between what is preferred and what
products are seen as ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’. Now hair care smells are not
related to the odour of hair. It seems that we have lost our sense of what hair
actually smells like. This was not always the case; in the mid-eighteenth
Century most people considered frequent washing as unhealthy (Trasko 1994).
Hair was damped with a sponge or towel dipped in scented water and
heavily powdered, like the wigs women wore at the time. This caused a
perfect nesting ground for lice and created intensive smells (Cox 1999). It
might be that then that the smells of a dirty head and the irritation caused by
lice was a more pertinent issue than the disguising or removing of grease.
Whereas nowadays the reduced occurrence of lice and the near
disappearance of the smell of hair means that only grease is sensually
apparent.

Figure 1, Powder and wigs 18th Century (Trasko, 1994)

In Douglas’ social theory of dirt she suggest that ‘as we know it, dirt is
essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of
the beholder’ (1984:36). When people wash and clean they are making their
environment i.e. hair conform to a societal pattern. Douglas illustrates this with
cleaning the house, ‘we are separating, placing boundaries, and making
visible statements about the home that we are intending to create out of the
material house’ (1984:69). As outlined above, our embodiment of smell, touch
and sight and our knowledge indicate to us when to deal with hair. How ‘dirt’
is detected and what is considered ‘dirty’ reveals a reconfiguration of social
ideals that are dynamic and change through time. What is acceptable or
non-acceptable dirt in hair partly depends on our ideas of cleanliness in the
society we live in.
This is not so say that we only cleanse our bodies to make us socially
acceptable and distinguish ourselves from others. There might be something
about the feeling of hair that is unwashed that touches us more
fundamentally – we don’t feel right in our skin. As one of the participants said
‘it's not that it [hair] looks greasy or anything. It's just because I know myself
that I've not took that time in the morning to wash it… Somebody else might
not know that I've not washed it that morning. It's just me. I am aware of it’. A

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full discussion of the relative power of social acceptance or intrinsic aversion

to dirt to motivate hair care is outside the realm of this paper, however it is the
system that defines what is personally and socially acceptable that leads to
the dealing with ‘dirty’ hair and the use of resources and this is therefore
further discussed in the next part of the paper.

Good and bad grease

For the women interviewed, dirty and greasy hair is ‘messy’, ‘lank’, ‘not clean’,
‘damp’, ‘looks a bit flat’, ‘coated in a layer of fat’, ‘stick together’, ‘limp’ and
‘heavy’. This greasy dirt seems to have different origins - it can be produced
through the body as in ‘my body creates grease’ or through sweat ‘I sweat
and therefore my hair feels sweaty’. Environments such as motor garages can
influence the greasiness of hair, as can certain styling products and
conditioners. These different origins seem to influence attitudes towards
grease and the resulting desire to wash hair. The grease that my body
produces seems to be viewed as ‘good grease’ as it regulates the ‘health’ of
hair. However when this greasy dirt is called ‘sweat’ it is entirely negative.
Further, the natural production of oil can be related to having a greasy hair
type and an ‘overproduction’ of grease that is ‘bad’ as it attracts dirt from the
atmosphere. There is a fine line between good and bad i.e. accepted and
non-accepted grease highlighted in the different stages of greasiness women
refer to: “lightly greasy, really greasy, doesn’t get that greasy, not overly
greasy”.
Ideas of good and bad grease are relevant for design as they are influenced
by the products and substances women use on their hair. Shampoos ‘do not
do their job’ if they still leave the hair feeling greasy - which is in direct conflict
with being concerned about shampoos stripping hair of its natural oils. So for
one of the participants,
‘it [shampoo] doesn't really feel like it does the job. It is clean, it is
almost like too clean because you know that feeling where you
feel like you are taking too much out of your hair and it is not how I
would want my hair to be after I washed it. I want it clean but I
don't want it to be like wrecked. I want it to be like clean but still
soft and that you know like still moisturised’.
Here, conditioners play an important part. They are often associated with
putting back the grease i.e. ‘coating’ the hair with what the shampoo has
removed. Conditioner is a synthetic product that substitutes for natural oils but
will not leave hair lank and greasy like natural oils. Mirroring the balance
between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ grease, the use of products and substances for
hair tries to achieve a balance that keeps it half clean, a bit greasy but
healthy where the natural production of grease has been replaced by the
synthetic product, the conditioner.
The idea of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ grease makes it possible to construct a scale
where the extremes are ‘too greasy’ and ‘too clean’, with intermediate points
‘greasy; and ‘clean’. After several days without washing, hair is ‘too greasy’
and looks and feels ‘lank’, ‘limp’ and ‘clumped. Hair also seems like this if
styling products are over-used or conditioners are used that are ‘too heavy
and rich’ which leave hair ‘coated in a layer of fat’. Women avoid having
‘too greasy’ hair so this state is an exception as cleansing practices pre-empt

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it. ‘Too greasy’ hair is associated with being ill or unhealthy or being a
homeless person.
On the other hand, too clean hair is stripped of all its natural oils and therefore
‘fly-away’, ‘unmanageable’ and ‘dry’. It is lacking ‘good’ grease. When hair
starts to show greasiness at the roots and along the hairline by being a bit
shiny it is not always viewed as being ‘bad’. This grease can keep the hair
‘manageable’, as a ‘natural’ styling aid that provides the necessary hold for
certain pin up styles and curls. Clean hair is described as ‘bouncy’, ‘shiny’ and
‘free-floating’ and is the most desired hair and is achieved through a fine
balance between finding a shampoo and conditioner that balance each
other in terms of natural grease reduction and synthetic grease production.
Little research has been undertaken on ideas of dirt and grease in hair;
research mainly concentrates on styles and fashion. However, such studies do
allow some conclusions to be drawn about ideas about grease and dirt in the
hair. In the recent past the idea of having grease in hair was accepted as a
way of styling it, including for example styles in the 1980s and styles of the
youth-based subculture called ‘Greasers’ in the 1950s. In the early twentieth
century grease in hair seems to have been more acceptable, even being
visible and encouraged. Women were keen to have natural looking hair that
was shiny, sleek and healthy looking (Figure 2). Earlier, men had used
Macassar oils to make their hair glossy, leading to the conventional use of a
small cloth, known as an antimacassar pinned to chairs and sofas to keep the
upholstery from being damaged by the greasy Macassar oil. This ‘good’
grease was not only visible on the hair but also on the things that came into
contact with hair. The scale of the change in our relationship to hair grease is
demonstrated by the degree to which in our hygiene aware and resource
intensive century this level of grease would be unthinkable and frowned upon.
(Cox 1999)

Figure 2, Long hair of the 1900s (Cox 1999)

It is ideas towards grease and dirt that determine washing frequency and
therefore they are significant when thinking about resource use. Because
these ideas are fluid and change over time, design might engage with them –
for instance to make natural oils more acceptable today. As shown above,
oils are still perceived as an integral part of keeping hair healthy and shiny.
However, along with different ways of dealing with grease and dirt, over time
natural oils have been replaced by synthetic ones. When grease was brushed
from the roots to the ends, hair cleansing used up fewer resources than
today’s frequent washes of hair. Ways of dealing with grease and dirt is
examined in the next part of the paper.

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Moving and healthy production to removing and adding

The Victorian convention of brushing the hair one hundred times each night
was intended to move excess hair grease from the scalp to the ends of the
hair – distributing it evenly. Regularly brushing was believed to encourage a
healthy production of natural oils - grease was moved, not necessarily only
removed. In this era, natural oils gave hair a shininess that was a sign of a
healthy person. Combs were used to keep the head free from disease, often
having two sets of teeth with different spacing, one fine set for cleansing
including removing lice and their nits and the other set with wider-spaced
teeth for styling (Cox 1999, Sherrow 2006). Whereas dust and lice were
removed from the hair, a certain amount of grease was tolerated. Specific
methods and techniques for using combs and brushes for cleansing were still
advocated until the 1950s – the time of the bouffant and beehive when
brushing became once more an important part of the beauty routine, as the
style meant hair could only be washed infrequently. Furthermore, the styles of
the 1950s were rather time-intensive to achieve and required a liberal use of
lacquer hair that needed to be brushed out (figure 3) (Cox 1990).

Figure 3, 1950s Bouffant style (Trasko, 1994)

Dry-shampooing has been practiced over the centuries with varying
prominence. Dry-shampoo penetrates the hair absorbing ‘dirt’, distributed by
brushes and combs and is then combed out. This way of dealing with grease
involves moving it and removing it by adding a special substance and using a
special set of techniques of brushing and combing. Though this used fewer
resources than current ways of cleansing hair, it might be that it was the start
of using a substance to remove grease. The practice of dry-shampooing has
become more popular recently and lost part of its old-fashioned image. Boots
reports a ‘45% rise in sales of dry shampoo in the past year, suggesting that, far
from being an excuse to go all Swampy, the new generation of dry-shampoos
offers a practical alternative to a daily wash and blow-dry’ (The Sunday Times
2008). However, this is not likely to be motivated by resource reduction but by
time saving.
During the 1960s seven days a week shampooing was advocated next to the
introduction of today’s technology of synthetic shampoos and conditioners
(Cox 1999). Styles of hair became more free-floating supported by the idea of
having ‘natural’ hair that just falls into place (figure 4). Techniques of brushing
were by this time completely replaced by a chemical substance to remove
grease and with the removal of natural oils balanced by conditioners to add
‘good’ grease. Losing their role in cleansing and the distribution of natural oils,
combs and brushes had by this time become exclusively styling aids,
specialised for different applications such as teasing, backcombing and
curling. This process started as early as the 1920s, the time of the Bob and the
finger wave, when women worried about combing out an expensive and
time consuming style abandoned regular brushing and combing (figure 5).
The emphasis on brushes and combs as styling tools became more established

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when women started to backcomb their hair to create body and lift during
the 1950s (Cox 1999, Sherrow 2006). The diversity of round brushes, vent
brushes, paddle brushes, cushion brushes etc. that are available now are
designed for specific techniques of blow-drying and styling hair (Daerlos 2005)
(figure 6,7) and to encourage women’s autonomy from the hairdresser by
making it possible to create a style easily at home. One side effect of this is
that the use of metal and stiff plastic brushes has led to trichologists
increasingly warning women of the damaging effects on the hair of the
extensive use of brushes and combs (Kingsley 2003). From being a process
that benefits hair health, in combination with chemical cleansers and
conditioners brushing and combing now threaten it.

Figure 4, 5, 1960’s Vidal Sassoon graduated Bob and 1920’s Bob with wave
(Trasko 1994)

Figure 6,7, A small selection of combs and brushes today (Draelos 2005)
Women judge products on a surprisingly functional basis – whether they ‘do
their job’ – though this job is mysterious; one participant describes a hair care
product as ‘magic’. This seems to result from the ‘job’ that hair care products
and equipment do now being divorced from the physicality of sebum, smoke
and parasites; they remove intangible dirt and address conditions that are
aesthetic rather than physical. Intangible ‘dirt’ and grease are removed and
added through chemical processes embedded in the formulations that we
use. The intangible ‘job’ that products do is defined through advertising where
the invisible is made visible by illustrating and naming conditions that
pathologise ‘dryness’ or ‘lack of shine’ and offer quasi-scientific remedies for
them.
Although chemical products ‘doing their job’ seem to have replaced the
human labour of brushing, combing and dry-shampooing, one of the expert
participants, a hairdresser, stressed that if people do not use the ‘right’
technique with a product it will not create the desired effect. This fact
suggests that the design of hair care products is an opportunity to encourage
techniques for cleansing that are supported by products that are less resource
intensive – if technology can supply synthetic substances that ‘do the job’ the
design and marketing of those substances can also define what that job is.

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Summary and conclusions

The paper has provided insights into the nature of cleansing and conditioning
practices today whilst reflecting on the history of hair care. It examined
sensual experiences with hair as a way of detecting grease and dirt, the
dynamic and changing personal and social acceptability of grease and
natural oils and the various ways of dealing with grease and dirt over the last
century.
This examination of the history of hair care can facilitate opportunities for
sustainable design, as a variety of past approaches were based on less
resource intensive practices. However, it does not suggest that to move
towards sustainable hair care practice designers need to ‘retrieve’ the past by
encouraging the use of brushes and combs as cleansing products. Rather the
design of hair care products is an opportunity to encourage more sustainable
everyday techniques for cleansing which are supported by chemical
products rather than being supplanted by them. Such techniques and
substances could rely on less resource intensive processes by for instance,
encouraging a new balance between natural and synthetic oils promoted by
more diverse concepts of what it is to have clean and healthy hair. Also this
paper has dealt with only one aspect of cleansing hair that largely ignores the
significance of time and styling. It is an initial analysis of the aspects of washing
hair which indicates that further work needs to be carried out to develop
more detailed design concepts and scenarios to confidently specify
approaches for more sustainable practices and products for cleansing and
conditioning.
This paper has tried to highlight that when thinking about opportunities for
sustainable design it is less effective to concentrate only on single products in
isolation from their use in everyday practices. In this case, this means
considering the reconfiguration of what it is to cleanse and condition hair as
the basis for sustainable changes. Resources consumed are shaped by the
nature of cleansing and conditioning as a practice rather than by individual
consumer choice, so if designers want to influence change they have to
consider the composition of all of the elements of a practice: ideas,
conventions, expectations, substances, products, available infrastructures,
temporal arrangements and routines that make the current resource
consumption possible. Following Shove, (2003) what is considered a ‘normal’
standard of hair and hair care needs to be conceptualised which requires a
cross-disciplinary approach to designing that uses ‘designerly’ thinking in
conjunction with theories of everyday practice and human/ objects
interactions.
Understanding material things requires understanding practices. Given that
practices and things are mutually constitutive, changing things might
accompany changing practices.

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References
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Wright, P., Blythe, M. and McCarthy, J. (2006). User experience and the idea of
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Sabine Hielscher
Sabine Hielscher graduated from the BA (Hons) course in Ecodesign at
Goldsmiths College, London in 2004. The course enabled her to engage with
ecological, social and cultural issues in design. While studying and upon
graduting Sabine gained work experience with the Institute for Ecological
Economy Research and more recently with Forum for the Future, where she
developed valuable insights into sustainable research projects and in
particular in the business programme of the Forum for the Future into
corporate social responsibility. Further, Sabine worked for Startup Design and
the Thomas Heatherwick Studio as a Design Assistant, and this afforded many
work-related design challenges. She is currently a PhD student at Nottingham
Trent University. Her research interests lie in sustainable design, human-object
interactions and design-led qualitative research methods.

Dr Tom Fisher
As well as craft learning and musical instruments Tom Fisher’s research interest
in human-object interactions encompasses the industrially produced designs
found in every day domestic spaces such as plastic objects and packaging as
well as designs that come about through informal processes, such as the
devices used in non violent direct action. This draws on his education in Fine
Art and Sociology and his background as an artist, craftsperson and musician.
He is currently working on a book for Earthscan about packaging reuse, with
Janet Shipton, and is Professor of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University.

Dr Tim Cooper
Dr Tim Cooper is Senior Lecturer in Consumer Studies and Head of the Centre
for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University. After graduating in
economics he worked in industry for fifteen years, latterly as an environmental
consultant, before establishing the Centre for Sustainable Consumption in
1996. His research interests include the life span of household products,
environmental policy, and consumer attitudes and behaviour. From 2004-08
he managed the EPSRC Research Network on Product Life Spans. He has
acted in an advisory capacity to the European Commission, European
Environment Agency, Council of Europe and Defra and has been an
Evaluator for the Irish Environmental Protection Agency and Belgian Federal
Science Policy Office. He was Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons
Environment Committee for its enquiry Reducing the Environmental Impact of
Consumer Products. He has undertaken consultancy work for a wide range of
industrial and environmental organisations and has written two books and
numerous papers and articles.

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