A Hairdresser Noticed Something Strange About Roman Statues, and Solved a 2,000-Year-Old Puzzle

The answer was hiding in an obscure Latin word that scholars had been mistranslating for decades.

When Janet Stephens isn’t cutting or coloring someone’s hair, she’s reconstructing the hairstyles of the ancient world. A chance trip to the Walters Art Museum turned the Baltimore hairdresser into an amateur experimental archaeologist when she noticed something interesting about the hairstyles portrayed on several Roman busts. The “hair” adorning the statues on display was perfectly (and sometimes elaborately) coiffed, but there didn’t seem to be a securing pin anywhere in sight. This also didn’t seem to be a case where false hair stood in for the real deal, while wigs and extensions existed in the ancient world (high-ranking Egyptians wore them as symbols of status, and were sometimes buried with them), and Romans did occasionally wear wigs, these hairstyles told of something else.

Stephens had every modern styling tool within reach to mimic the styles, but wanted to figure out how she could recreate the hairstyles on mannequins with only the tools used in ancient Rome. She pored over Latin texts and deciphered them with Google Translate, and in 2005, after years of researching and attempting to emulate what she saw on the busts, she had a revelation. The ambiguous word acus , found in the works of authors such as Ovid and Juvenal , can refer to multiple objects: a single-pronged hairpin, a curling iron, or a needle and thread. While experts had understandably long translated “acus” as “hairpin” in reference to hairstyles, Stephens wondered whether it actually might mean “needle and thread.” To test her theory, she used a needle and thread to literally sew Roman hairstyles into place. Her results were astounding.

“Using needle-and-thread to arrange female hairstyles answers the question of how they were constructed with readily available equipment,” Stephens said in a 2008 study published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology . “The often complex hairstyles depicted on portrait busts can be reconstructed simply, economically and accurately on real hair, without the need for expensive false hair .”

And “complex” might be an understatement. Ancient Roman fashion included elaborate hairstyles that involved multiple braids wrapped around the head or basket-woven tresses. These could not be kept in place with the single-pronged hairpins (or bodkins ) that were commonly used at the time. Heavy hairpins would have slipped through the fluffy bangs created from layers upon layers of curls during the late first century.

But when Stephens ran her needle through rows of braids and sewed them together, she saw that the hold was better than any hairspray, even though the only other thing she styled them with was water (though wealthy Romans were known to use pomade). These sewn hairstyles were made to last, and possibly even to sleep in.

Despite its artistry, in ancient Rome, being a hairdresser (or ornatrix ) was considered a lowly profession. Aristocrats and others who were well off usually had servants or slaves style their hair. Elaborate hairdos were a display of wealth and power, boasting to the world that a woman could afford extra hands to turn her hair into a crown . Many of these coifs were only achievable with help from someone else, and poorer women often styled each other’s hair.

Stephens thinks the loop of the thread may be what eventually inspired the invention of more convenient (and much easier to remove at the end of an event) U-pins, which salons now order by the pound to hold modern updos in place.

“When a woman has living hair that she can arrange into a fashionable style, she does not need to buy a hairpiece,” said Stephens, whose YouTube channel features video on recreating ancient follicle fads. “The majority of Roman women of all classes did not need or use false hair to achieve their fashionable hairstyles.”

Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.

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