How often did people in the 1700’s in America and Europe wash their hair in the 1700’s
I’m going to guess that all people in the 1700s washed their hair in the 1700s. 
Very few people in the 1700s washed their hair in the 1400s, for sure.
In seriousness, the first thing you have to bear in mind is that it depends what people you’re talking about. Today hygiene standards are pretty universal in an industrialized country because 99.9% of people have access to running water and soap, so whether you’re rich or poor the usual expectation is that you should be pretty clean. That would not have been the case in, say, colonial America or 1750 London; it would have been much harder to get access to lots of clean water. There was little indoor plumbing, so getting enough water for proper washing and getting it warm enough to be comfortable was very, very hard work and the ease of access depended on where you were. In cold climates during the winter, getting warm water was extremely hard and houses themselves were quite cold so the experience of washing could be exceptionally unpleasant. Whenever available people liked to swim in rivers and lakes as a form of bathing, but again that’s weather-dependent.
Contemporary accounts of how people took care of their hair in days past would suggest that people, especially women, places a lot more importance on their hair brushes and frequent use of them to care for their hair.
So the answer is basically that they did not wash their hair nearly as often as we do, but rich people and people with access to clean swimming water would have kept their hair reasonably clean, and everyone tended to brush their hair a lot to get dirt and dust out.
As a sidenote, before the advent of plastics hair brushes and combs were very expensive and made of wood or ivory for the rich.
Rickjay is confused by modern standards. People bathed all the time before running hot water. It was less pleasant and less common in winter, but people in, say, colonial America washed up as they were able. Even deserts, people managed to get half clean.
I am aware that people bathed a lot less back then, becasue of the cold and lack of running water. I suspect sponge baths were popular. I want to know how often they washed just their hair, for example by pouring water over their head from a pitcher or basin, while standing in front of a bucket or something. Was this commonly done, and how often?
I’d hazard a guess and say that washing one’s hair was pretty rare back then, because without some kind of soap/shampoo just getting your hair wet isn’t going to do very much in the way of making it clean. Oil & water don’t mix so it isn’t going to wash away the natural oils your hair produces (nor all the detritus it attracts). Plus these oils essentially protect and waterproof your hair, although by modern standards it simply looks greasy & unclean.
For questions like this, consider shooting a note to Colonial Williamsburg. I’ve done a couple programs down there and they are the experts on the most mundane aspects of (at least) early American life.
They had soap in the 1700’s
Cite? For the expensive part, I mean - woodcarving would have been a common-enough skill, I doubt wooden combs, at least, were all that expensive. Neither were horn ones, I imagine. They turn up often enough in the archaeological record, and not just in a wealthy context. Plus, of course, brushes and combs are tools for other work as well, like textile manufacture and horse maintenance…
Maybe never. Especially among the well-to-do, they shaved or close-cropped their heads and wore wigs. That also kept the lice down.
dirt bath.
You might get some of your questions answered by this:
History of the Home - Bathroom
I dot know know how much things changed between the time when early America was settled by the English in the early 1600’s - the late 1700’s but it is clear from numerous accounts that most of the early Northern European settlers did not place much emphasis on cleanliness at all. The Native Americans around Jamestown flat-out made fun of their new English neighbors for being filthy and malnourished people of slight stature because of that.
It wasn’t just because the European settlers didn’t have much infrastructure available in their new home. Most of Western Europe at the time was a filthy place with poor sanitation systems in general so they were used to it culturally. There were also some odd theories about bathing floating around. Some people believed that immersive bathing or even getting wet at all was the root cause of many serious diseases so they either avoided it almost entirely or did it sparingly.
Here is an article about bathing in Colonial Williamsburg (they generally didn’t do it much) and had the odor to prove it:
I should point out that daily bathing is a fairly recent trend even in the U.S. I had a copy of my father’s old Boy Scout manual from the 50’s. It has a chapter on cleanliness and hygiene stressing the importance of it. It explicitly says that Scouts should meet that goal by bathing in some form at least twice a week and washing their hair once a week. That was considered to be an improvement over what many people viewed as normal at the time. Many women used to get their hair washed and set at the hairdresser and then didn’t have it washed again until the next scheduled appointment.
They had it earlier than that, but it took quite a while to become commonplace…
Sure, but have you ever tried washing your hair with real soap? I have. It sucks. Not just in a comparison to shampoo, but just generally speaking, it leaves your hair stiff and gross. I wouldn’t want to do it often if it was my only option.
Daily brushing of long hair will do a good job distributing the oils all the way to the ends, rendering conditioner irrelevant. Plenty of people today don’t use soap or shampoo in their hair (although most of them do get their hair wet in the shower.)
In the specific time period of the 1700s, we’re including the powered hair and powered wig period, for certain countries and social classes. Some of them just shaved their own hair, and other would use powders to clean their hair, as well as cosmetically. Powder will absorb oil and as you brush it out, your hair is clean. Ish. We still have such dry shampoos today, although now they tend to come in an aresol instead of a jar with a puff.
This is one of those questions that isn’t answerable in the general, because people are so varied in their habits, and I doubt it’s answerable in the specific, because people didn’t think such things worthy of writing down much. I mean, we only recently rediscovered that people used to go out visiting and working on projects around midnight, after First Sleep. Daily habits, especially of working class people, weren’t as well documented as they are today.
That is true but there are some references that make note of it. There is even a saying in New England today that the early settlers ‘took a bath once a year whether they needed it or not’!. You may think that is a joke but it really isn’t. That was true even for aristocracy and royalty in Europe. Bathing in any sense was not in vogue at the time.
It wasn’t a technological problem. They knew how to clean themselves just fine but were opposed to the idea. They just believed it was either unnecessary or harmful. The Roman Empire loved bath houses and its citizens indulged in them daily if they could afford it. Native Americans were very hygienic as well and you wouldn’t have a problem sitting next to one on public transportation from that period even today. It was just the Europeans that were especially nasty and foul smelling little things (don’t get offended; I come from that stock too). Bathing and personal hygiene just wasn’t a cultural priority to say the least at the time.
I owned a house built in 1760 in Massachusetts. It has been semi-renovated to accommodate some modern customs but is mostly pristine and the bathrooms are shoehorned into spaces that used to be reserved for other things. There was absolutely no way for anyone to take a proper bath during the winter months. The open wells that they got their water from are still there but they would have been chilly to near freezing for 6 months of the year at least.
The bottom line is that you can only get to be so filthy and then you plateau so that you can’t become any more dirty overall. That was the socially acceptable state of almost every European settler or descendent during the 1700’s and remained that way all the way well into the 20th century among many populations.
Well, from personal experience I wouldn’t bet that Boy Scouts today bathe that often unless the adults make them…
The bristles of brushes would often be pig’s bristles (that is, pig’s hairs), the handles could be all kinds of materials. Carey turtles almost became extinct at one point because their shells were an enormously popular source for combs.
One wonders if people’s hair would’ve been cleaner back then if they didn’t wash it, considering the quality of water supplies.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century for example, using London’s municipal water supply for washing up was rather icky:
“As cesspools overflowed, sewers had to take the strain. But they poured into the Thames, from which the metropolis took its drinking water. At its worst this was black liquid swarming with vermin, including tadpoles and leeches.”
Paradoxically, drinking water might’ve been somewhat cleaner before the advent of flush toilets. But it’s likely that in urban areas, effluent still seeped into rivers and streams, leading to coliform counts that would be unimaginable today.
You do eventually reach a stink plateau where you don’t reek any worse, but you’re fairly fragrant when you get there. In Boy Scouts (heh) when we were at Philmont, we had a stretch of something like 6 days straight with no showers, hiking in the NM mountains in summertime. After the first 4 days, we didn’t get any worse smelling, and I imagine with some damp rags and some cologne, we’d have been halfway presentable, if a little funky.