1950s Hairstyles

Video Transcript

"Hairstyles in the '50s got more and more elaborate as the decade progressed. I'm wearing a sort of early '50s hairdo. The biggest thing is that your hair needed really to be done. You didn't roll out of bed and have it look natural, it wasn't supposed to look natural. It was supposed to be a coif, which is the French word for hairstyle. The biggest most popular style was the bouffant hairdo, and that involved a lot of volume at the crown. Now I have a modified boufant in right now. There's a little bit of volume you can see behind the headband, and the bangs have been arranged, and there really isn't a hair out of place. And that's what was really important. In keeping with wanting to look like a lady, you would definitely have your hair done professionally or you would sleep in hot rollers, and you would want it to be very clean, and very styled. Nothing easy, no waves, no over-elaborate curls, just very very polished. And the way that you would get the bouffant was by back combing, which is taking a comb and brushing it towards the scalp, and that really built up the hairstyle. And so there were some famous singers who had intense hairdos like Beehives, which is really just an exaggerated version of the bouffant. But the important thing to remember is really volume at the crown, like here, and styled around the face. You didn't really pull your hair off of your face. You always had some sort of around it because you didn't want to look severe. You wanted to look soft and in complement to clothes."