Egyptians wore wigs as sunscreen for shaved heads
Wigs—short for periwig from French perruque—cover heads with human, animal, or synthetic hair to hide baldness, change style, or mark costume. Ancient Egyptian men and women often shaved and wore wigs to shield scalps from sun. China popularized them in the Spring and Autumn period; Japanese elites ahead of the Nara era; Korean gache thrived until an eighteenth-century ban.
Wigs hide baldness, change a look or complete certain professional uniforms. Egyptians of both sexes often kept their hair shaved or cropped short, and besides covering bare scalps they fixed wigs over natural hair with beeswax and resin. Rich Egyptians wore elaborate versions crowned with scented cones of animal fat, and Assyrians, Phoenicians, Jews of Israel and Judea, Greeks and Romans all wore wigs as ordinary fashion.
After Rome fell in the West, wigs largely vanished there for about a thousand years. Christian ideals favoured plain, modest appearance, and married women usually hid their hair under veils or wimples anyway. Elites occasionally added false tresses, sometimes sewn onto caps or nets, and medieval wigs of hair fixed to leather caps fitted badly and never caught on.
The sixteenth century brought them back to cover hair loss and flatter looks, with a hygienic bonus: a shaved head under a hairpiece that could be deloused easily kept lice at bay, as fur hoods also did. Royals led the revival. Elizabeth I wore a tightly curled red wig in a Roman style, and Louis XIII, balding early, took up wigs in 1624.
His son Louis XIV spread the fashion across Europe in the 1660s, and men wore wigs for some 140 years until dress changed with the French Revolution in the 1790s. Charles II brought shoulder-length periwigs to England at his 1660 restoration after exile in France. In September 1665 Samuel Pepys wrote that he had hesitated to wear his new periwig, fearing its hair might come from plague victims.
Source: Wig
