» Ancient Hair Removal Techniques

Ancient Hair Removal Techniques

The pursuit of a hair-free body may be as old as the cavemen. Archaeologists have evidence that men shaved their faces as far back as twenty thousand years ago, using sharpened rocks and shells to scrape off hair. The Sumerians removed hair with tweezers. Ancient Arabians used string. Egyptians, including Cleopatra, also did it — some with bronze razors they took to their tombs, some with sugar and others with beeswax. The Greeks, who equated smooth with civilized, did it, too. Roman men shaved their faces until Emperor Hadrian — although Julius Caesar is said to have had his facial hairs plucked. Roman ladies also plucked their eyebrows with tweezers. Another primitive method of hair removal, actually used by women as late as the 1940s, involved rubbing off the hair by rubbing skin with abrasive mitts or discs the consistency of fine sandpaper.
As an alternative, there were lotion and cream depilatories (from the Latin d_pil_re: d_-, completely + pil_re, deprive of hair), which dissolved–and still do–hair above the surface of the skin. (It should be noted here that while the term depilatory has seemingly meant cream and lotion forms of hair removal, by definition it technically includes wax and sugar, as well.) Early depilatories were made from such choice ingredients as resin, pitch, white vine or ivy gum extracts, ass’s fat, she-goat’s gall, bat’s blood and powdered viper. Evidence of depilatory use dates as far back as 4000-3000 B.C., when women used a depilatory (”rhusma turcorum”) containing orpiment (natural arsenic trisulphide), quicklime (used to make cement) and starch made into a paste. Clearly, throughout history there have been drastic lengths to which people would go to eliminate body hair.