So, I would like to know…
Were there any form of beautician, hair stylist, or barber in the middle ages? What about the dark ages? In particular, I would like to know if they existed in the European regions, but I would also like to know if they existed in other parts of the world, like Asia, Africa, the Middle East…
So, does anyone have a clue?
Barbers, certainly. In the middle ages they were barber-surgeons, they did not just cut hair, they amputated limbs too, and extracted teeth. According to Wikipedia there were barbers as far back as ancient Egypt.
they had barbers because many people were afraid to shave themselves, in the absence of the modern safety razor.
Are you referring to someone who would serve the masses, or a private servant who tended to such things for a member of the nobility?
I was about to post this…
This is an important distinction. Are we talking about someone in a rich person’s household (servant or slave) who would perform those tasks. In which case definitely, you could probably trace that back to the dawn of civilization.
When these professions existed in their own right, offering their services to the public (or at least the richer part of it), is another matter.
In Angkor Wat, one of the temples, the Bayon, has bas-relief carvings of daily life in twelfth century Cambodia. I can’t find an image now, but one of the carvings is definitely of someone having their hair done.
the seats of civilization all have records and depictions of (wealthy) people who appeared well-groomed, or in the process of being groomed. consolidation into the greek and then the roman empire, and then extended to western europe can be nothing but inevitable.
There were barbers shaving customers during the roman empire. The masses in Rome routinely had themselves shaved daily. Some authors complained about their services. Perhaps they stayed around, at least in Rome, during that time
The “Thousand and One Nights” a.k.a. “Arabian Nights” has several stories where people pay a barber to cut their hair and/or depilate them.
I guess, I am thinking of the kind of hairstylist that we have today. Like hairstylist for the common people.
Could a person non-nobility, non-royalty, go into say a bath-house and get his/her hair cut or done, nails manicured, etc. back then?
There is a Barbers Guild in London that dates back to 1308. As njtt points out above, as well as performing hair-related duties they would also perform surgical and tasks According to that link one of the reasons this was a papal decree in 1163 that members of religious orders (who would traditionally carry out medical duties) should not assist in the shedding of blood.
You haven’t seen thedocumentary footage?
Barbers are probably fairly universal as your average plebe probably didn’t have any decent hair cutting or shaving implements. One guy with whatever people used to cut their hair with could service a whole village. With low start up costs, high potential to build demand, no infrastructure (early barber likey worked outside or in homes) it is an obvious early service profession.
I’ve always wondered why these two, seemingly unrelated, services were bundled together in antiquity.
Is it simply because so little was known about medicine at the time that the guy with the sharpest knives and steadiest hand was the most qualified to be a surgeon?
The Good Earth starts with Wang Lung going to a town barber before meeting his new bride-to-be. The barber teases him that only hicks are still wearing a long queue, and then offers to clean his his ears and nostrils for two pennies. Wang counters by offering one penny, and the barber sneers that he will then do one ear and one nostril. Wang ends up paying for the cleaning, and the barber throws in a free neck massage.
“While I’m at it, would you like me to nick that wart off?”
“I could probably do something about that lump…”
“You say your foreskin’s too tight? You’ve come to the right place!”
And so on…
The arts of beautician and æsthetician were classified and described by 1st-millennium Hindu erotic texts, like the Kāma Sutra, and were called the sixty-four śṛṅgāra* (erotic arts/adornments). They were also available in the urban Middle East during the high points of Islamic civilization. I think any urban society that’s sufficiently economically developed to have something approaching a middle class will have luxury services like these publicly available. If that was not true in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages, it’s an exception that tests the rule. Something to account for its absence in medieval Christian Europe must be sought. Perhaps that the medieval church frowned on bathing, and the arts of cosmetics derived from grooming which derived from basic cleanliness i.e. bathing. The 11th-century Islamic theologian al-Ghazzali made the connection between cleanliness and cosmetics explicit, and scolded the fashionable Muslim men of Baghdad for getting hairdos and using makeup like young brides.
*The word śṛṅgāra ‘sexual passion/desire, erotic adornment’ is derived from śṛṅga ‘horn’ so that the Sanskrit word for erotic literally means ‘horny’. I’m just sayin. (The word śṛṅga is an Indo-European cognate of English horn and Latin cornu. Possibly related to the Semitic root for horn, q-r-n, one of several proposed Indo-European–Afro-Asiatic cognates.)
God bless you for saying and using this expression correctly.
The church in fact did so, but only during the late middle ages. Before that, going to the public bath would have been a perfectly normal activity. The “dark ages” were much more hygienic than the Renaissance.
Wikipedia suggests that it followed this progression:
Priests once did the surgery, but became forbidden to shed blood by Papal decree. Since barbers had knives and knew how to use them, priests supervised while the barber did the cutting. Eventually, the barber-surgeon became independent, without the priestly oversight.
I suspect this arrangement was kept stable because of the low quantity of demand for surgery, but the high importance of demand. (In other words, you might only need surgery a few times during your lifetime, but you do want a surgeon available when the need arises). Because you don’t want to pay the surgeon to sit idle 90% of the time, he keeps busy with a daily/monthly need like barbering.
There is no school like the old school. Old SNL was the best.