At Home With Your Hairdo

At Home With Your Hairdo

by Victor Vito

I was stunned when I picked up this little paperback book with the half pink and half purple cover.  I paid $2.95 for this book which originally cost 60 cents when it was first published in 1959.  Yes...that is right...1959.  This is a book that shows you how to put old fashioned rollers in your hair and how to layer your pin curls so that you get the right page boy look.  It boasts that it provides detailed home instructions and that it is lavishly illustrated.  I guess for 1959 this was true.   For 1998 the book seems almost prehistoric.

I was fascinated with the black and white photos that demonstrated the end results of brush curlers and heavy teasing which is now called backcombing.  I was amazed to see hair "shaped over cotton" which amounted to photos of women with huge wads of cotton stuffed into their hair to guarantee a perfect pageboy look.  To show the era of this hair book, their is a photo of Paulette Goddard, a movie star from long ago.  Paulette is shown with soft clean hair that demonstrates the beauty of naturalness.

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This 1950s book definitely promoted short hair.  One chapter shows three triplet girls with braids down to their thighs.  The facing page showed the same three girls with "better more grow up" styles with very short and curled hair.   The book points out how much better they look with the shorter "more flattering" looks.  I was horrified at the newer and improved image, but realize that the 50s was a time of short curls.

This book is so old that it does not even have an ISBN number.  I found it in a stack of old books on a bottom shelf at Powell's in Portland, Oregon.  The buyer for the hair and beauty section happened to be there when I picked up the book and she seemed amazed that I wanted to buy it.  I told her the photos of the old hair rollers and the pin curls were priceless.  This book is truly and antique in the hair care world.

I am not sure Amazon.com could begin to find this book for you.  If they can, they would be great.  If not and you stumble across it, snap it up.  It is priceless.