Up until the 1960s or so, men would put a little dab of Brylcreem or some other oily stuff on their hair to make it stay put. Then, prompted by the makers of The Dry Look® and other hair sprays (“The wet-head is dead”), most men abandoned hair oils.
Pullet, there are many ways to get your hair to form dreadlocks (not braids.) The guys who had dreadlocks before dreads were cool (the Rastas and the Aussie aborigines) did it the natural way. Wash your hair regularly, but never comb it. It just naturally gloms into uneven strands.
Thanks, La Llorona and AskNott! Interesting stuff. I think it’s a pretty old practice to suspend perfume extracts in oil so they won’t evaporate as quickly, but if someone knows for sure, please weigh in.
Although, I was asking how someone with hair that isn’t kinky gets dredlocks. I knew it was a natural consequence of not brushing kinky hair. I had heard that folks with straight or wavy hair had to use some sort of heavy petroleum product.
Ooh – I knew listening to thousands of hours of old time radio would pay off.
Hair oil was a part of men’s grooming for most of the 19th century, when heads dripping with macassar oil necessitated the use of the “antimacassar,” (an anti-oily doily) to keep the upholstery on backs and arms of furniture from being soiled. (Macassar oil is coconut oil mixed with essential oil pressed from the flowers of the ilang-ilang tree, which has the practical advantage of being pleasantly perfumed, and the connotative advantage of being associated with aphrodisiacs and sexual tonics.)
In the U.S., the first nail in the coffin of the Brylcreem empire was hammered by Vitalis, which competed directly with the king of the oily products, Brylcreem, and spread the meme of oils as “grease,” which sounds much less appealing that “oil.” “New Vitalis with V-7 will keep your hair neat all day – the greaseless way.”
They chipped away from the beginning of the 1940s, sponsoring many programs. Ironically, their most successful campaign worked because they stopped emphasizing the relative novelty of the product and targeted young people by suggesting that the grooming products that their fathers used wasn’t “grown up” or sophisticated enough: You might not remember Vitalis, but I’ll bet dollars-to-doughnuts that you remember their characterization of their unnamed rival as “greasy kid stuff,” from the '60s, if only as an (unpaid) Elvis Presley endorsement.
I can still remember the kid next door’s dad, who persisted in oiling his hair well into the 1970s. His wife, his kids, the neighbors’ kids, everybody teased him mercilessly with “Still using that greasy kid stuff?” He fumed. I imagine I wouldn’t take kindly to it from a seven-year-old, either.
That’s what I thought of when I saw the thread title. We’ve somehow managed to escape the dreaded hair lice here at Casaflodnak so far, but I’ve heard other mothers swear by olive oil in place of, or as an extra treatment after, the medicated shampoos. Whether it works or not, I have no idea, but the belief that it does is sure making the rounds.
My best friend when I was a kid (Brooklyn, 1960s) who used to have to soak his hair (tight, curly) in olive oil on a regular basis. His father, who enforced this process, was an Italian dude who felt strongly it was the healthiest thing in the world.
My friend turned out to be a radical drug-dealer who was headed to prison the last I saw of him. His hair, however, was very healthy.
I don’t think very many people in India use olive oil as a conditioner, perhaps because it’s a fair bit more expensive than other kinds. Coconut, almond and amla oils are perhaps the most popular hair oils here.
Personally I don’t use 'em, because getting the oil out is a bitch. But I can certainly do with the occasional head massage with a particular eucalyptus-scented oil. Heavenly, and well worth the effort getting it out.
Yeah, and they don’t understand why I don’t, living in the States.
The best part of it IMO is the massage you get. Usually your grandma will do it, and it feels so good.
But it is *impossible * to get it out, particularly if your family is poor and doesn’t have a shower, just a tub and you have to dump the water over your head. My hair is nearly two feet long. It’s hard enough to wash it bent over like that as it is.
Wow, thanks for all the responsed. Brings back some memories too, not all good. Once as a wee lad I stumbled into the bathroom squirted a tube of stuff on my toothbrush and jammed it into my gob. It took a few seconds for my brain to register it wasn’t Crest. A little dab’ll do ya. <shudder>
I google search turned up places that still sell tubes of Brylcreem and Vitalis hair tonic which I assume is the same yellow liquid that every well groomed man had in his medicine cabinet in the late sixties. This is the coolest link I found, in the spirit of mulletsgalore.com
I am suddently assaulted with the thought of how greasy hands and hats must have been in the greasy hair era. In the old movies, you can see people like Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart running their hands through their hair pretty often. Yech.
I use olive oil as a weekly oil treatment on my hair. Mist hair with oil and wear a shower cap around the house for an hour; cheapest hot oil treatment ever and keeps my hair from being too frizzy. Yeah, I smell like a salad until I shower but one shampoo and the oil is gone.
My grandmother taught me the same thing. She would heat the oil in the microwave until it was warm, comb it through my hair, and let it sit for about an hour, then I would shampoo, and rinse with vinegar.
Not only is it good for the hair, but it’s great for the scalp.
I wanted to give a shout out to Gouda and Anaamika for telling the traditional Indian hair care secrets of coconut (Cocos nuciferæ semen) oil and amla (Phyllanthus emblica) oil. Another great Indian hair oil is made with bhringaraj (Eclipta alba) in sesame oil.
Bhringaraj is thought to promote hair growth. You massage your scalp with it at night before bed and wash it out in the morning. Amla oil is used as a conditioner after washing, like Brylcreem (whose name derives from that greasy old-timer stuff, “brilliantine”; the Italian Moustache Petes in the old days used to walk around brilliantined, and wouldn’t have felt fully dressed without it, remember, Eve?).
I use coconut oil and bhringaraj oil in my hair at night and have no difficulty shampooing it out in the morning. I have about two feet of hair myself. I also have the finest-textured hair in the world. When it’s very dry and fluffy it feels weightless, like it isn’t really there. Maybe the difference is in the type of shampoo you use. I had been using Avalon Organics for years and it washes the coconut oil out just fine. In fact, in the shower my whole body gets a light coating of coconut oil as it’s being washed out of my hair, good for the skin. When a hair stylist sold me on Kérastase oléo-relax to control my tendency to frizz and split ends, I left off using the before-bed oil. The two products are just too dissimilar to work together. I didn’t feel that Kérastase shampoo was designed to be able to wash oil coconut oil. When the Kérastase ran out and I went back to Avalon Organics, I went back to using the coconut — so I could get up oily in the morning!
I’ve heard that macadamia nut oil is good for overnight in the hair too, but of all, the oil I like best is jojoba (Simmondsia chinensis). I add rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) essential oil to it to promote hair growth. If I use jojoba and rosemary at least a couple nights a week, my hair is happy.
So does anyone who naturally has oily hair ever use a regular oil treatment? My hair tends more towards oily with a wide wave. The wrong kinds of shampoos or conditioners will either flatten out the curl, or dry it out to straw after a few weeks. Any hair experts what to take a stab at whether oil treatments might be a good idea?
Johanna, I’ve been raised too Americanized to really enjoy it I think. I wash my hair every single day, even though it’s a little healthier to leave it for a day in between. I don’t like my hair feeling the least bit oily and I could never leave it overnight. I just used to *lurve * the massage.
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