I was thinking about some of the old scifi novels I’ve read. In Heinlein’s Puppetmasters and possibly others, he talks about a woman hiding a small gun in her hair. Is that even possible? What would hold it up?
What sort of situation would that be useful in though?
I guess you can use a throwing knife to actually hold up your hair. Or have sharpened chopstick like things to hold the hair up.
As a guy, I know nothing about women’s hairdos though so let me know if that’s possible. 
I think it would be possible to hide a derringer, or a small semi-automatic…like a .25, in one of those beehive hairdos from back in the day. A gal could fashion a sort of nest with hairpins or hatpins to hold it enough for non-athletic movement. A wig might provide more options.
In the craptastic Hannibal, at the very beginning the FBI was trying to bring down some female gang leader. They were warned that she carries a dirty needle (I can’t remember if it had HIV or Hepatitis on it) in her updo.
I heard that a few years ago, Art Garfunkle was in the back of a limo in NYC, and the limo driver was pulled over for speeding or something…
The cop smells reefer coming from the passenger compartment and pulled Art out for questioning. They searched him and found he had hidden what was left of his stash in his jewfro (instead of eating it like a normal person would have).
I don’t recall where I heard this, but want to think if anyone could pull this kind of a thing off successfully, it would have been Art Garfunkle and his 'fro.
I’ve done it. Sort of, anyway.
I don’t have a 'fro. I’ve got long hair which is always tied back in a ponytail (I’m a guy, if that’s at all relevant here).
Back in the bad old days of New York City, I always carried a small can of pepper spray. Sometimes I’d go out to a nightclub or something where you’d be patted down before you could enter.
The pepper spray cans I carried were quite small, and had a shirt-pocket clip (like a pen). I’d clip the can to the rubber band tying up my hair (between my neck and the ponytail – best way I can think of to describe it).
It was never found, and I must have been patted down a hundred times.
Of course, I was never arrested and searched by a real pro, like a cop or corrections officer.
I guess you could get a pair of wooden or bone combs and sharpen them but you’d have to be careful not to poke a hole in your own head!
I’ve got shoulder-length-plus straight brown hair that I sometimes wear up in a semi-French-twist arrangement, clipped with a large barrette. I once tucked a very small water pistol (loaded) in the “loose” part of the twist underneath the barrette. Nobody looks very closely at your hairdo unless it’s a really striking style or color anyway, and the weapon was small and inconspicuous.
I managed to obtain access to my target without having anybody suspect that I was packing wet, and successfully completed my assignment. Mwah-hah-hah-hah.
I see no reason at all why the same thing couldn’t be done with a real gun along the lines of a tiny “spy pistol” or some such, but I’ve never tried it.
It was done, back in the late 60s or early 70s. Sorry, my Google-fu isn’t hitting on all cylinders at the moment, so I can’t find a cite. There was a man who was on trial in the US. I believe he was a Black Panther. He hid a small handgun in his 'fro and shot at (and possibly killed) the judge.
Kind of throws out that whole “presumption of innocence” thing to shoot the judge during the trial.
I believe the incident to which I am referring is the Marin County incident on August 7, 1970. The incident involved Angela Davis and Jonathon Jackson. I know guns were smuggled into the courthouse, but I may be misremembering.
Amy Winehouse, druggie extrordinaire, hid coke in her beehive, pulled it out and snorted it onstage.
So a gun was probably totally doable in the '60s. Maybe not so much right now.
We have a problem with some of our boys at school, who are in local gangs, hiding weapons such as small knives etc in their fros. They also commonly wear, quite openly stuck into the hair in plain view, those fro combs with long metal tines. They’re easily used to rake stripes into someone, or can inflict a nice line of shallow but painful puncture wounds. I don’t know why the school hasn’t banned them.
Anyone who grew up in the 60’s remembers the little toy derringers, based on real ones I assume. Those could probably be concealed anywhere, but some places might be painful.
With one of those “bump-it” hair things that make the wearer look like they have some terrible skull deformity, you could hide a grenade or two.
A garotte could easily be concealed as a ponytail tie or “scrunchy”, plus there are all sorts of things that could be done with sharpened bobby pins at close range.
There was a case in Ohio a few years ago where state prison officials wanted to be able to require Sikh prisoners not to wear turbans because of concerns that they might conceal weapons in them. IIRC, the state supreme court held that the prisoners’ First Amendment right of religious expression (which, for Sikh men, includes not cutting their hair, and wearing turbans) trumped the prison’s concerns about security, absent a showing that Sikh prisoners were actually abusing their rights in that regard.
I have curly hair and could probably hide a tiny weapon in my hair were it not for two things: one, my hair is thin, but I’m sure in thick curly hair you could do it easy, but the other, bigger problem, would be getting it unstuck. Curly hair has a tendency to wrap around/tangle up in anything in it (you should see what a bitch it is pulling claw clips out of my hair at the end of the way, and I comb the knots out every morning) and while the tangliness would hold the weapon up, it would also prevent you from pulling it out smoothly and easily. I can just see someone trying to dramatically yank it out of their hair and getting tangled up and yanking their own hair out.
Slippery Jim di Griz, “the Stainless Steel Rat”, hides bombs etc in his hair in the Harry Harrison novels. They seem to be extremely small.
Back in the 1960’s the “hard girls” - ratted (teased) their hair really high. Some of them hid razor blades in there, knowing that the non-hard girls’ fighting strategy was not so Kill Bill and that the cheerleader types would just start pulling hair.
I did see a fight in the girls restroom at Hueneme High* where a girl did grab a razor blade. It was ugly.
*OP, I believe you’re in Ventura, so you may relate to this.
2500 years from now we will see how right Harry was.
Considering some of the stuff going on in his novels its a pretty dark future. Anyone else for the fuse room?