I tried a 300-year-old hair care routine for a year & this is what I learned (it's awesome!)

🛏 Thank you Birch for sponsoring this video! Visit https://www.birchliving.com/abbycox to get $400 off your Birch mattress plus two free pillows! Back in the good ol' days of the mid-2010s, when I worked for Colonial Williamsburg and was wearing 18th-century clothes for 5 years, I also spent a year following 18th-century hair care routines, using pomade and powder to clean my hair and scalp (keep it smelling fresh), and minimizing washing my hair using modern shampoo and conditioners. (Let's just say that this is an OG No-Poo hair care practice...) I was able to do this because of my workplace environment, which allowed and encouraged this sort of experimental archeology and research, and over the course of that year, I learned *a lot* about how the 18th century viewed hair hygiene, hair care, and hairdressing. There are a lot of myths and exaggerations around the hair in the 1700s. 1. Did pomade and powder attract bugs and lice? 2. Did women in the 1700s wear wigs? (how were they able to create those crazy tall hairstyles if they didn't wear wigs??) 3. Anglo-American and Western European people had dirty hair. 4. People's hair smelled bad. etc. etc. etc. So yeah, I learned a lot, and a lot of myths were busted. 18th-century hair care and hair hygiene are *different* than our practice today, but that doesn't mean that the hair was dirty or that their hygiene was poor...it was just different. There are a lot of benefits to pomading and powdering your hair, and there ar