The kettle's on, the foil's open on the trolley. A client we've worked with for nine years is asking, mid-foil, about the history of hairdressing. Not the appointment. The work itself. She's not asking out of idle curiosity. She's the kind of woman who reads the panels at the V&A, and reads them slowly. The conversation has space. The colour has another twenty minutes to develop.
The honest answer is: hairdressing is older than most of the written history we have. The chair you sit in today on Paisley Road West has a long lineage. It runs through ancient Egypt and Greece. Through the powdered wig courts of eighteenth-century Paris. Through the heated tongs of the 1870s. Through the cotton-wadding sweeps of a Carita colourist in 1974. We use techniques today that other hands invented thousands of years ago.
This is a pillar piece for The Craft, the editorial side of Endz. It's a slow walk through the lineage. The longer answer to a question asked over a foil, by a woman who deserves the longer answer.
The work began long before anyone gave it a name
Hairdressing as an organised job is older than the written record in most places. The earliest tools archaeologists have catalogued from ancient Egypt include bone and wood combs, hairpins, and small flint blades for trim work. Egyptian hairdressers were divided into two ranks. Private, who worked for a single household. State, who worked for the palace and the courts. Hairstyle indicated rank, age, class, and lineage. A salon, in a recognisable form, already existed.
In ancient Greece, hairdressers were called kekryphaloplokoi. The lampadion, a side-bun, was a standard of the period. Calamistra, red-hot iron rods, were used to set waves. (Yes, a curling iron. We've been heating metal to bend hair for at least two and a half thousand years.) Both Aristophanes and Homer mention hair work in passing, which is the kind of citation we like. It tells us the work was so familiar it didn't need explaining.
Colour was already a discipline. Egyptian women used henna to mask grey, an ancestor of the grey blending we do today. Roman recipes for dyeing hair black survive in their texts. The Greeks bleached with vinegar and time in the sun. Three thousand years before we mix a toner at the bowl, the impulse to choose your own colour was already there. The chemistry has improved. The impulse hasn't changed.
In Rome, the tonsor cut hair, often in a public shop or on the street. In wealthier households, women called ornatrices styled the women of the family. The work was specialised. The tools, the postures, the order of operations, the consultation: most of it would be recognisable to a stylist today.
Hairdressing is not a Western invention. African traditions held the hairdresser in deep community standing, with tools passed to successors through ceremony rather than sale. The picture, anywhere you look, is the same. This is one of the oldest things people have done for one another.
The seventeenth century is where the work first gets a name
The word "hairdresser" arrives in seventeenth-century Europe. Before that, the work existed but went under other terms, mostly in French. Coiffure. Dresser les cheveux. The first hairdresser whose name appears in the public record as a celebrity, rather than as a tradesperson, is Champagne, born in southern France. He opened a salon in Paris in the mid-1600s and worked there until his death in 1658, by which point his clients included the highest of the French court.
This is the period when the work shifts from a household function to a public practice. A woman of means doesn't simply have someone come to her room. She has somewhere to go. The shape of a modern salon is starting to appear. A chair, a mirror, a trained hand, a booking.
It's also the period when the hairdresser starts to keep a clientele, take referrals, and build a reputation that travels. Word of mouth was, and remains, the original SEO. The eighteenth century would build on it considerably.
Paris built the academy, and the rest of Europe followed
The eighteenth century is when hairdressing became a formal profession. Legros de Rumigny was appointed the first official hairdresser to the French court. He published Art de la Coiffure des Dames in 1765, a manual for working colourists and stylists, and opened the Académie de Coiffure in 1769. The structure of training, certification, and reputation that runs through the trade today begins here.
By 1777 there were roughly 1,200 hairdressers working in Paris. Read that twice. A city of about six hundred thousand people supported a thousand-plus chairs. Léonard Autié and his peers, who styled Marie Antoinette and the Versailles court, were as well-known as the painters and the writers of their day. Hair was visible work, public work, and well-paid work.
Beyond Paris, the trade was setting up shops across Europe. By the end of the century, hairdressing manuals were being translated into English, German, and Spanish. The Académie's training method spread. Apprenticeship became a recognisable pattern. Years at the bowl under a senior colourist, then a chair of your own. That pattern still describes how we work today.
There's a lesson in this period that lasts. The great hairdressers were teachers as well as practitioners. They wrote it down. They trained the next generation. They built a craft that survived their own retirement, and survived a revolution, by writing the work into a curriculum.
The nineteenth century put heat in the hand of the colourist
The nineteenth century is where the toolkit we still use takes shape. Marcel Grateau, working in Paris in the 1870s, refined the use of hot tongs and gave the world the Marcel wave. A sustained S-shape set into the hair by careful turning of heated metal. Versions of his irons sat on salon trolleys for the better part of seventy years. The curling iron in your bathroom today is a direct descendant.
The same century saw the first synthetic hair dyes, derived from coal tar. The chemistry was rough. The formulations were not yet stable. The toning palette was nothing like what we mix at the bowl now. But the principle was set. Apply, develop, rinse, tone. The bottles in our colour room are, in lineage, the great-grandchildren of those nineteenth-century jars.
Salons started to look like salons in this period. Heated curling irons became standard tooling by the late Victorian period. Hairdressers opened on the high streets of London, Glasgow, Paris, and Edinburgh, no longer the preserve of the court. The middle class could now sit in a chair and pay for a hand that had trained for years.
For balayage, for the colour grow-out, for the way a hand-painted technique builds tone in the hair, the nineteenth century is where the chemistry began. We still walk apprentices through the lineage when they're learning to mix at the bowl.
The twentieth century opened the door twice
The twentieth century is where the door swings open. First around 1905, when Karl Nessler, working in London, produced the first commercially viable permanent wave machine. A contraption of curlers, heated rods, and chemical paste that would horrify any modern colourist, but worked. Permanent waves meant curl that survived shampoos. Women who'd grown up with daily Marcel sets could now book in once and walk out with hair that held for months.
The bob arrived in mainstream fashion in the 1920s, though most accounts trace it to a Parisian stylist working around 1909. It was the first time mass-Western women had short hair as a fashion statement. The bob made the cut the central question. Before it, women's hair was generally only trimmed. The great drama of the work was the colour, the set, and the up-do. Sassoon, half a century later, would push the foundation of cutting into pure geometry. We've walked through the cuts that shaped each era separately, from this 1909 bob to the freehand grow-out we work now.
The 1930s and 1940s built on the permanent wave with safer chemistry. By the 1950s, Raymond Bessone, born 1911, was on British television presenting hair work as entertainment. His catch-phrase was "teasy-weasy". He had a primetime Saturday show. He popularised the bouffant in living rooms, not just salons. Hairdressing had become culture.
Then the door opened a second time, in the early 1960s. Vidal Sassoon released the Five Point Cut. Geometric, architectural, designed to fall back into shape after washing. It rebuilt cutting as a discipline of precision rather than ornament. Sassoon's London studio trained a generation of cutters who would later staff every serious salon in Britain. The shape of a Sassoon-trained cut is still legible at a thousand chairs today.
The chair you only leave when the work is right.
The same decade brought the second great pivot, this time in colour. At the Carita salon in Paris, founded by sisters Maria and Rosy Carita, a young colourist called Yvan was lifting fine strands at the nape of the neck and painting bleach onto them by hand. He separated each painted strand with a piece of cotton wadding rather than foil. The Caritas, watching him work, named the technique balayage, French for "to sweep". On the 1st of April, 1974, the New York Times ran a piece by Angela Taylor describing what Yvan was doing at Carita. The technique reportedly went through something like 1,300 feet of cotton on a busy salon day. We've kept the longer history of that Paris room separately, for anyone who wants the cotton-board years in full.
That brush-and-hand technique is the one we still hand-paint at the chair on Paisley Road West, fifty years on. Foil entered the colour room in the 1970s as well. Annie Humphreys is credited with the foil highlighting method that became the global standard. But balayage stayed freehand. For the right hair, the foil-free answer remains the better one.
A version of what balayage on dark hair actually requires is something we keep returning to in the journal, because the technique is genuinely old and genuinely good.
Trevor Sorbie's Wedge cut in the 1970s, and the Sassoon-trained generation building their own studios through the 1980s and 1990s: the late twentieth century kept compounding the gains. By the time the salon moved to No. 386 in 2020, the craft had three thousand years of working hands behind it. The lineage was unbroken.
What we keep from three thousand years of hands, at No. 386
Twenty-eight years on the chair teaches you which parts of the history matter, and which parts were of their moment. Most of the moments are gone. Powdered wigs. Marcel sets. The beehive bouffant. 1980s big hair. None of those are coming back. Most of the structure stays. The consultation at the door. The hand on the head. The toner mixed for the eye and not for the bottle.
The two things that survive intact from the seventeenth-century French academies through to a Tuesday in Glasgow in 2026 are the consultation and the chair. The consultation is the long, slow conversation at the door about what someone actually wants. The moment before any work is done. We've inherited it directly from the Paris salons of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which were as much listening rooms as treatment rooms.
What we ask at the door hasn't changed in essence since those academies. How does the hair fall? What's the canopy doing? Where does the colour break? What does the client see in the mirror at home in late afternoon, when the salon light isn't there to flatter? These are old questions. They're still the only ones worth asking before the work begins.
The chair, in the second sense, is what we mean when we say "twenty-eight years on the chair". It's the practice. The hand, the eye, the standing-up-for-eight-hours, the year-after-year accumulation. The salon has been on Paisley Road West since 2020, by appointment, single guest at a time. The chair, meaning the colourist's actual practice, is older than the address. Since 1997, in two different rooms before this one, building toward the way we work now.
If we had to pull a single craft point out of three thousand years of hairdressing, it's the one we tell every apprentice. The colour grow-out matters more than the colour at the door. What we do on a Tuesday only really gets graded at week twelve. Marcel knew it. The Caritas knew it. The point of the lineage is that the work is judged later, in the mirror in the hallway, not at the door of the salon.
The toner story is the same. Mixing for the eye, not for the bottle, is something every generation of colourist has had to relearn. The only honest way to teach it is at the bowl with a client in the chair.
A south-side hairdresser with twenty-eight years on the chair sits at the end of a long line. The chair on Paisley Road West is one chair. The hands that came before it are many.
That's the long answer to a question asked over a foil. The short answer: hairdressing is one of the oldest things people do for each other, and the only honest way to keep doing it is to read the lineage and then turn back to the head in front of you. The door at No. 386 Paisley Road West is open by appointment, the kettle's on, and the conversation is where every piece of work begins.
If you'd like that conversation, a consultation at the chair is where it starts.