I tried Ruth Goodman's "How to Be a Tudor" Haircare routine

Today I have a vlog for you that I filmed in August and September of 2020. Pandemic Chic for the last year and change has included sweatpants, fewer showers, and the messy up-do. This had me passively wondering about how 16th century people handled hygiene more. One one likes being stinky after all, but they did not believe it was necessarily healthy to shower as often as we do in the United States in 2020. Please note I am not going to perpetuate the myth about medieval people being dirty and unclean, it was just a different time period with different methods.

Around this time I started reading How to be a Tudor by Ruth Goodman. When the book was published in 2015 I added it to my to be read pile immediately because I respect her work as a historian and in living history. Like many, the pandemic has helped me put a dent in my "to be read" pile. She has a section where she discusses the clothing and the hygiene of the Tudor period and I became inspired. One of the major ways people had to keep their hair clean in Medieval and Tudor England was using linen caps or coifs to keep it covered, and combing their hair out to remove an excess of dandruff and oil collecting on the scalp. It is the build up of these items which will start to cause your hair to smell with bacteria building up. I did a little research on my own and found that by the Tudor period combs were incredibly common personal items found in archeology. Even the sailors of the Mary Rose in the 1540's had a large number of them among the surviving effects now visible in the Mary Rose Museum. The most popular style of comb was the 2 sided comb like the ones I use in this video and had been in active use in Europe since the Ancient Romans. The idea of using this comb for medieval hair care was simple. Use the wide teeth to detangle your hair, and use the narrow teeth to keep the scalp clean. In my personal experiment I found the horn comb I used was better at cleaning my scalp, but the sandalwood comb was better and detangling and distributing natural hair oils. By the 16th century I found a few images of bristled brushes also being used, but they were far less common. I did add a boar's hair brush into my experiment a bit to see how it would spread the natural hair oils compared to the double sided combs. The brush did not remove debris from the scalp, but as a follow up after combing, it did a much better job at spreading the oils down the length of hair. During the experiment I did not use modern hair elastics to make sure I was not tampering with the results I would find. I went without hair elastics with a few experiments similar to Morgan Donner's Elasticless hair video. I used linen cotton tape, silk ribbon, and bits of hand braided linen as ties or bindings for the hair. After 2 weeks what were my conclusions on this method of medieval haircare? For the first time in my adult life I did not have split ends. Split ends drive me nuts and I am no stranger to leave in conditioner, wooden combs, and different combing styles. All do work and have their pros and cons, but none were as effective for my hair as combing and brushing the natural oils down. It took about as much time to comb out my long hair each night as it would for me to properly wash and condition it using modern methods. One did not save time over the other. I became very aware of the amount of oil my scalp was producing and it was higher after I had eaten fried or high fat modern foods. after a day and a half my body would return to normal amounts of natural oil. The hair oil after eating junk food also did not smell as good. This anecdote is probably a good reminder that we are what we eat, and that the fast majority of medieval people were not eating deep fried potatoes, which would have required their bodies to process out their waste differently. Next week's video is going to discuss another solution to the oily hair situation which I started researching after doing this experiment. Did you know they had a version of dry shampoo in the medieval period? I hope you have enjoyed this little experiment about medieval haircare. Do you have a pandemic experiment that you have done. Did you try anything like this project? Let me know about it down in the comments section and I will see you next week with another historical hair care video.