What Did People Do Before Shampoo?
Shampoo as we know it today is less than a century old, but the act of hair-washing stretches back thousands of years. So what did people do before sudsing up in the shower?
A clue can be taken from the word “shampoo” itself. It comes from the Hindi champo, meaning “to massage, press, or knead” — indicative of some of the early hair-cleansing practices, even if it was just with plain old water. Only later did the term come to describe what we now think of as washing our hair. Here’s a look at how people kept their locks shiny before modern shampoo.
Ancient Cleansers
Around 4,000 years ago in the Indus Valley (modern-day Pakistan and northwest India), washes formulated specifically for hair began to emerge. Soapberries — fruit from the sapindus tree — were boiled with dried Indian gooseberries, also known as amla, to make a gentle cleansing solution. The soapberries produced a lather, while the amla’s fatty acids and vitamin C helped nourish tresses. Centuries later, the Yao people in southern China had a similar tradition, washing their famously long hair with rice water, a custom that continues today.
Rudimentary soaps made from animal fats and plant ashes were common in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, although it’s unclear if these harsh concoctions were used for personal hygiene or for other cleaning such as laundry. Indeed, Romans typically maintained their hair simply by combing it and applying oils. Hair-washing wasn’t a regular habit, but rather a ritual one: Plutarch described women washing their hair before accessorizing it with flowers for the festival of Nemoralia in honor of the Roman goddess Diana.
In Egypt, soapwort plants were used to wash hair. These plants contain natural compounds known as saponins that create a mild lather when crushed. Animal fats were added for conditioning, citrus juices helped clean, and fragrant oils made it all smell good. Across the Atlantic, many Indigenous peoples in North America also used plants with saponins, such as yucca. The roots were peeled and ground into a sudsy pulp, then mixed with water to wash both hair and skin.
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Medieval Hair Care
Contrary to the perception that personal hygiene was lacking in the Middle Ages, people didn’t actually ignore their hair. Most medieval Europeans simply rinsed with water, while well-off households often made their hair cleansers out of ashes, egg whites, and herbs or flowers for fragrance. Combs were important for more than keeping up appearances: In a time of minimal hair-washing, they were trusty tools for removing dirt buildup and lice.
Colonial Soaps
As Europeans arrived in the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, they brought their hygiene habits with them. Combs helped keep hair relatively clean and critter-free, but hair-washing was infrequent. When hair was washed, it was typically with water or homemade soap. Soap mixtures hadn’t strayed much from ancient formulations — animal fat and ashes — but by this time the soaps were boiled and set into cleansing bars. Enslaved people in early America adapted to the limited resources they had, using cornmeal and oils to clean the hair and scalp.
Throughout the 1800s, hair-washing practices evolved. In 1814, Indian-born entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomed opened a spa in Brighton, England, offering Eastern-inspired treatments such as oil-based head massages. The popular service eventually became known as “shampoo,” an English take on the Hindi word champo. Mahomed’s treatments became beloved by clientele such as King George IV and King William IV, and he is often credited with introducing the idea of hair-washing as a dedicated ritual to the U.K.
Soapmaking continued to improve, and by the late 1800s, the brands Cuticura and Ivory were being sold not only for washing the body but also as shampoos for the hair. The turn of the 20th century saw a major leap in hair care when German chemist Hans Schwarzkopf invented a dissolvible powder shampoo in 1903. It didn’t take off in the U.S. right away; in 1908, an instructional article titled “How To Shampoo the Hair” ran in The New York Times.
Shampooing began to find popularity in America in 1909 with the launch of Canthrox shampoo, a powder that was dissolved in water, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that regular hair-washing became commonplace with the advent of liquid shampoos.
