Elizabethan Hair Styles

Wearing their hair long, women did not wear bangs. They scraped their hair back from the face to expose the forehead. Ladies braided and then coiled it -- encircling the head, coiling over the ears or forming 'horns' either side of the head. They covered these coils with increasingly elaborate head coverings that developed from simpler medieval forms. Ladies selected hoods and wimples with complex folds, high crowns, gables or peaks. Enclosing their coils in hairnets and snoods, ladies decorated these with gold, pearls or semi-precious stones. Poorer women wore cauls -- similar to snoods, these were cloth bags to cover the coiled hair. Noblewomen might also wear cauls, but theirs would be elaborately decorated. Renaissance society considered a large forehead to be beautiful. Ladies plucked all the hair from the front of their heads to make the hairline recede. Ladies continued doing this into the Elizabethan era -- consider portraits of Queen Elizabeth I with her high forehead and plucked eyebrows. Hairlines had receded and hats were much smaller by the late 1500s, displaying more hair. Ladies parted their hair at the centre and wore fashionable "French Hoods" set far back on the head. A French hood is a wide hair-band covering the ears. Ladies edged their hoods with decorative jewels or "billiments" and wore jewels in their hair.

Renaissance fashion admired blond hair. Italian ladies would spread their hair out in the sun to bleach it, after combing in a mixture of wine and olive oil. Renaissance ladies used alum, sulfur and the acidic juices of rhubarb, lemons or walnuts as hair bleaches. They brewed organic dyes from onion skins, cabbage stalks or saffron to enhance their hair's golden tones. Women gathered oak apples to make black hair dye and knew recipes for making conditioners. Noble women fragranced their hair and their hairnets with rosewater, cloves, nutmeg and musk.

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