Then, to continue the natural approach to bright, shiny blonde hair, Louis suggests a lemon or lime squeeze. “Simply take a lemon or lime and squeeze it onto freshly-washed hair, gently comb through and let dry, preferably in the sun, but a hairdryer will do on rainy days.”
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Louis says the citrus juices act as a mild bleach and gently lighten the hair.
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“Continue this treatment for a few days, and any natural blonde will see her hair lighten up, take on shiny highlights and glow just like sunshine,” promises Louis.
“By starting this natural highlighting treatment now,” says Louis, “blondes can have sun-lightened hair well before it’s time to slip into that first bikini.” 

Get the true sun-lightened look fast! Just spray on Sun-In. Give your hair that sun-lightened look that once took all summer.

Sun In works with nice, warm, natural sunshine. Lightens faster than the sun. But never so fast as those harsh hair-lighteners. You’re in complete control — from that first little highlightening to as sun-lightened as you’d like to look.
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And because Sun In conditions, use it often ’til you and your own special sun-lightened look discover each other. You’ll look like you spent all summer in the sun. Try regular or (for the maximum sun-lightened look) new Super Sun In. All you add is sun.

Max Factor creates “Color-Controlled Blonding”… so even brownettes can go blonde in one lightening-quick step.

It’s sunshine you shampoo in. Now brownettes can go blonde and blondes can go blonder. The very first time. And in one lightening-quick step.

Only California Blonde gives you these shades, all softness and sunshine. Truly natural-looking blondes that last shampoo after shampoo.

And if you like the idea of hair that’s more manageable, healthier-looking, and nicer to touch, only California Blonde gives you the benefit of 12 conditioners in a proteined base.

You’ll see, no matter which coast you live on,life’s a lot sunnier when you’re a California Blonde. In 6 Glow West Shades.
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New Tried & True California Blonde. Only by Max Factor.

Years ago, there were only two types of blondes. Demure but mousey. And bright but brassy. 

But, baby, things have changed. And today a blonde can be downright sexy and still be a lady. If she knows about Clairol’s Born Blonde.

Born Blonde isnt a timid blonde that promises everything and then doesn’t deliver. But it isn’t an old-fashioned formula with peroxide in both steps either. (It was those tough-as-brass bleached cuties that started the rumor that blondes were dumb.) 

Born Blonde is different. Feels different. Acts different. First, you gently take the darkness out of your hair with Born Blonde lightener. Then you shampoo in Born Blonde toner in any of 12 shades. Extra rich (we put in lots of conditioners) and extra gentle (we leave out peroxide), Born Blonde toner makes your hair feel good while it makes it look good.

Of course, using Born Blonde isn’t sticking to the rules. But do you want to play fair? Or win?
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When you go blonde, go all the way

Lemon Go Lightly – Gently lightens under the sun!

Brown, blonde or in between? You can go lighter with CLAIROL Lemon Go Lightly. It lightens your hair with a little helpfrom the sun. Just spray it on, and go as light as you like… gently … gradually.
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Rich CLAIROL conditioners help protect your hair’s natural texture. keep it soft and manageable as it lightens. P.S. If you’re a darker brownette, or a blonde in a hurry, get CLAIROL Lemon Go Lightly Plus.

Remember grade school and that little blonde with the long braids? The one all the boys adored?

Well, boys still adore girls with blonde braids. But a fat lot of good that does you if your hair is washed-out blah mousey brown or dull and dark.
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And if you think summer and the sun and a timid formula is enough to make you really blonde, you’re just fooling yourself. What you need is Clairol’s Born Blonde.

Has your hair gone into hibernation?

Brown, blonde or in between? You can go lighter with CLAIROL Lemon Go Lightly. It lightens your hair with a little help from the sun. Just spray it on, and go as light as you like… gently … gradually.
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Rich CLAIROL. conditioners help protect your hair’s natural texture. keep it soft and manageable as it lightens. P.S. If you’re a darker brownette, or a blonde in a hurry, get CLAIROL Lemon Go Lightly Plus.

For nearly two centuries, powdered wigs—called perukes—were all the rage. The chic hairpiece would have never become popular, however, if it hadn't been for a venereal disease, a pair of self-conscious kings, and poor hair hygiene.  

The peruke’s story begins like many others—with syphilis. By 1580, the STD had become the worst epidemic to strike Europe since the Black Death. According to William Clowes, an “infinite multitude” of syphilis patients clogged London’s hospitals, and more filtered in each day. Without antibiotics, victims faced the full brunt of the disease: open sores, nasty rashes, blindness, dementia, and patchy hair loss. Baldness swept the land.

At the time, hair loss was a one-way ticket to public embarrassment. Long hair was a trendy status symbol, and a bald dome could stain any reputation. When Samuel Pepys’s brother acquired syphilis, the diarist wrote, “If [my brother] lives, he will not be able to show his head—which will be a very great shame to me.” Hair was that big of a deal.

Cover-Up

And so, the syphilis outbreak sparked a surge in wigmaking. Victims hid their baldness, as well as the bloody sores that scoured their faces, with wigs made of horse, goat, or human hair. Perukes were also coated with powder—scented with lavender or orange—to hide any funky aromas. Although common, wigs were not exactly stylish. They were just a shameful necessity. That changed in 1655, when the King of France started losing his hair.

Louis XIV was only 17 when his mop started thinning. Worried that baldness would hurt his reputation, Louis hired 48 wigmakers to save his image. Five years later, the King of England—Louis’s cousin, Charles II—did the same thing when his hair started to gray (both men likely had syphilis). Courtiers and other aristocrats immediately copied the two kings. They sported wigs, and the style trickled down to the upper-middle class. Europe’s newest fad was born.

The cost of wigs increased, and perukes became a scheme for flaunting wealth. An everyday wig cost about 25 shillings—a week’s pay for a common Londoner. The bill for large, elaborate perukes ballooned to as high as 800 shillings. The word “bigwig” was coined to describe snobs who could afford big, poufy perukes.

When Louis and Charles died, wigs stayed around. Perukes remained popular because they were so practical. At the time, head lice were everywhere, and nitpicking was painful and time-consuming. Wigs, however, curbed the problem. Lice stopped infesting people’s hair—which had to be shaved for the peruke to fit—and camped out on wigs instead. Delousing a wig was much easier than delousing a head of hair: you’d send the dirty headpiece to a wigmaker, who would boil the wig and remove the nits.

Wig Out

By the late 18th century, the trend was dying out. French citizens ousted the peruke during the Revolution, and Brits stopped wearing wigs after William Pitt levied a tax on hair powder in 1795. Short, natural hair became the new craze, and it would stay that way for another two centuries or so.

Per the Oxford English Dictionary, "bangs" as a term for the fringe of hair lying over the forehead originated in the stables. Horses' tails were sometimes allowed to grow to a certain length, and then were cut off in an even, horizontal trim called a "bangtail." Racehorses were sometimes called bangtails. And Green's Dictionary of Slang suggests "bangtail" actually originated in Scotland, not the US. "Bangtail" was first applied to human hairstyles as early as 1844, but the OED cites the first use of "bang" as 1878. "Bang" meaning "abrupt or sudden" has been used in English since the late 18th century; more details here at Grammarphobia:

Q: Why does the word “bangs” refer to a fringe of hair cut straight across the forehead?
A: The use of “bangs” (or “bang”) for that short fringe of hair originated in the US in the 19th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
But the usage has its roots in “bangtail,” an equine term seen on both sides of the Atlantic. So let’s start our investigation in the stables.

The word “bangtail” is defined in the OED as “a (horse’s) tail, of which the hair is allowed to grow to a considerable length and then cut horizontally across so as to form a flat even tassel-like end.”

The dictionary notes that the term has also been used in Australia for cattle with tails cut that way, and in the US as slang for a horse, especially a race horse.

The earliest citation for “bangtail” in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is from a Scottish journal, suggesting that the term may have first reared its head in the British Isles.

Green’s cites an 1812 issue of the Edinburgh Review that mentions a stud horse named Bangtail, but the name surely came from an even earlier use of the term.

Through a Google search we found a comic British story about fox-hunting, published in 1851, in which “bang-tail” appears least seven times in reference to tails as well as horses.

The story, “Turning Out a Bagman,” by a writer signed “B.P.W.,” is about two London greenhorns who are on vacation and want to hire a pair of hunters.

​The showily groomed horses they hire are called “bang-tails,” and are described as having “such flowing bang-tails as at once stamped them in the eyes of our friends as ‘out-and-out’ thorough-breds.”

The story is chockfull of slang (like “bagman” to mean “fox”), which may explain the repeated use of “bang-tail” instead of “horse.”

Apparently it didn’t take long for “bang” to graduate from horse tails to human hair.
We found an 1844 travel book, Revelations of Russia by Charles Frederick Henningsen, that mentions a man’s hair cut “somewhat in the fashion of a thorough-bred’s ‘bang-tail.’ ”

In another travel book we came across an 1849 entry that describes a woman whose hair was braided in back and “cut in bang style” in front.

The OED’s earliest citation for the human usage is from a letter written in 1878 by Frances M. A. Roe, author of Army Letters From an Officer’s Wife: “It had a heavy bang of fiery red hair.” (The “bang” was on a face mask in a shop window in Helena, in the Montana Territory.)

Another American, William Dean Howells, also used the word in his book The Undiscovered Country (1880): “His hair cut in front like a young lady’s bang.”

A Google search turned up a plural reference in an 1883 article from the New York Times. A Catholic priest, lecturing Sunday school children, “condemned the fashion of wearing ‘bangs’ in severe terms.”

A matching adjective (as in “banged” hair) and verb (to “bang” or cut the front hair straight across) also emerged in the 1880s, according to citations in the OED.

Here are a couple of examples: “He was bareheaded, his hair banged even with his eyebrows in front” (from the Century Magazine, 1882), and “They wear their … hair ‘banged’ low over their foreheads” (from Harper’s Magazine, 1883).

So it would appear that the verb “bang” (to cut hair straight across) emerged after the hairstyle and not before, unless there are earlier verb references we haven’t found.

That still leaves us with a question: Why did “bang” mean bluntly cut?

Both Green’s and the OED indicate that since the late 1500s the verb “bang” has meant to hit or thump, and the noun “bang” has meant a blow or a thump.

And “bang” has been used adverbially since the late 18th century, the OED says, to mean “all of a sudden,” or “suddenly and abruptly, all at once, as in ‘to cut a thing bang off.’ ”

Since the bangs on a person’s forehead, like a horse’s banged tail, end abruptly—you might say with a  “bang!”—perhaps the word is simply a case of creative English.

A collection of humor pieces, Wit and Humor of the Age (1883), takes the creativity a step further. In a story by  Melville D. Landon, one chambermaid asks another “if she banged her hair.”
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“Yes, Mary,” the first chambermaid says. “I bang my hair—keep a banging it, but it don’t stay bung!”

​A Short, Uneven History of Bangs
From Cleopatra to Kate Moss, a journey through some of history's greatest bangs.

Barbering is one of the oldest professions in history, and there is more to its story than cutting hair alone. I became interested in this topic after reading an article published by the History Channel titled "Why are barber poles red, white and blue?". The article shares that "barber pole’s colors are a legacy of a long-gone era when people went to barbers not just for a haircut or shave but also for bloodletting and other medical procedures". On the pole, the red represented blood, the white bandages, and the blue veins. ​

As you can imagine, this raised many questions about who was qualified to provide medical procedures. Should only university trained professionals facilitate them? Was apprenticeship training enough? Should one person be allowed to cut hair, conduct dental work and perform surgery? The debate unfolded in different ways across Europe. 
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Southern France, Spain and Italy
In these regions, barber-surgeons saw their status constantly fluctuate from revered “knowledge healer” to “medical conman”. Their relevance to healthcare didn't receive much recognition because medicine and surgery were never treated as separate professions. In 1254, Bruno da Longobucco, an Italian physician who wrote on surgery, complained about barbers performing phlebotomies and scarifications (1). It was the first public sign of physicians' dissent towards other professions encroaching on the market for medical services.

Northern France
Demand for surgical services in this region became so high that it required an abundance of surgeons to meet it (1). Barber-surgeons were able to respond to the demand faster than university graduates because they had no formal certification process in place before entering the field. Many physicians felt the skill and training required to practice medicine was threatened by the number of barber-surgeons performing surgeries, so some medical facilities started banning operations to distinguish doctors from surgeons (1). Despite this, France legitimized the barber-surgeon field by establishing the College de St Cosme (Côme) in 1210, which taught both physicians and surgeons in Paris. However, on campus there was still an issue of class between the faculty teaching each subject. Professors who wore long-robes were physicians entitled to conduct surgeries, while those who wore short robes still needed to pass certain exams and apprenticeship hours to do so. In quiet rebellion, the short robed faculty members partnered with barber-surgeons outside of the college, and began teaching them anatomy lessons in exchange for their sworn allegiance to the short robed division of the school. In 1499, barber-surgeons sought more autonomy, mainly in the form of demonstrations via their own cadavers (1). A power struggle ensued, with the short robed division of the college withdrawing their support. The short robed faculty eventually acquiesced to the long robed faculty in 1660, essentially acknowledging physicians' superiority over the surgical profession at the time. Outside of universities, the number of barber-surgeons continued to rise, but the quality of their services deteriorated without access to proper schooling (1). 

England
Similar to France, physicians in England initially disliked surgeries. A surgeons guild was created in 1368 that joined forces with physicians in 1421 (1). Despite this, the Guild of the Barbers of London received a charter from Edward the IV himself in 1462. This likely elevated the barber-surgeon's class and seniority enough to influence a future partnership between the Guild of Surgeons and the Company of Barbers in 1540, which together became the United Barber-Surgeon Company (1). This organization lasted for over two centuries, until 1745, when England also saw barbers and surgeons part ways as the need for university education in medicine gained social approval. At this time surgeons formed the Royal College of Surgeons, which is still operating today (8). 

Check out the timeline below to see how the barber-surgeon profession evolved into the 18th century. ​

The legacy of NBC's Friends isn't one of ratings records or piles of awards—it's about the way the show managed to impact popular culture by showing life at its most mundane. This is a series that turned sipping coffee into an art form, still prompts philosophical debates over the morality of being "on a break," and made it impossible not to shout pivot! when moving furniture. But Friends reached its cultural zenith when it managed to transform a simple hairstyle into a global talking point, as untold millions of women in the ‘90s flocked to salons all wanting one thing: “The Rachel.”
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“The Rachel” hairstyle, which was the creation of stylist Chris McMillan, was first worn by Jennifer Aniston’s Friends character Rachel Green in the April 1995 episode “The One With the Evil Orthodontist." It has its roots as a shag cut, layered and highlighted to TV perfection. It may have been a bit too Hollywood-looking for a twenty-something working for tips, but it fit in the world of Friends, where spacious Manhattan apartments could easily be afforded by waitresses and struggling actors.

The style itself wasn’t designed to grab headlines; McMillan simply gave Aniston this new look to be “a bit different,” as he later told The Telegraph. In hindsight, the ingredients for a style trend were all there: The cut was seen on the show’s breakout star as the series hit its ratings peak; an average of more than 25 million viewers tuned in each week during Friends's first three seasons. You can’t have that many eyeballs on you without fans wanting to get closer to you, and the easiest way to do that is to copy your style.

During the show’s second and third seasons in the mid-1990s, stories began to appear in newspapers and magazines about salons from Los Angeles to New York City and (literally) everywhere in-between being inundated with requests for Aniston's haircut. Some women would come in with their copy of TV Guide in hand for reference; others would record an episode of the show and play it at the salon to ensure accuracy. For these stylists, a good hair day for Rachel on a Thursday night meant big business over the weekend.

"That show has made us a bunch of money," Lisa Pressley, an Alabama hairstylist, said back in 1996. Pressley was giving around four "Rachels" per week to women ages 13 to 30, and she was touching up even more than that. Another hairdresser estimated that, during that time, 40 percent of her business from female clients came from the "Rachel." During the early days of the trend, McMillan even had people flying to his Los Angeles salon to get the hairdo from the man himself—a service that he charged a modest $60 for at the time.

A Finicky 'Do

What many clients learned, though, was that unless you had a trained stylist at your side, “The Rachel” required some real maintenance.

"People don't realize the style is set by her hairdresser," stylist Trevor Tobin told The Kansas City Star in 1995. “She doesn't just wake up, blow it dry, and it just turns out like that."

That was a warning Aniston knew all too well. In recent years, she has expressed her frustration at not being able to do the style on her own; to get it just right, she needed McMillan on hand to go through painstaking styling before shoots. In addition to being impossible to maintain, in a 2011 Allure interview, Aniston called it the “ugliest haircut I've ever seen." In 2015, the actress told Glamour that she found the look itself “cringey."

Though Aniston had grown to loathe the look, it was soon the 1990s' go-to style for other stars like Meg Ryan and Tyra Banks and later adopted by actresses and musicians like Kelly Clarkson and Jessica Alba. Debra Messing had an ill-fated run-in with it when she was told to mimic the style for her role on Will & Grace. They soon realized that trying it without McMillan was a fool’s errand.

“[It] was a whole debacle when we tried to do it on the show,” Messing recalled. “They literally tried for three hours to straighten my hair like [Aniston's]. It was so full and poofy that it looked like a mushroom.”

A Style That Sticks Around

Aniston’s personal preference for longer hair soon made its way on-screen, replacing the shorter, choppier “Rachel” by season 4. The once-iconic look was officially ditched, the last remnants of which were washed away in a flowing sea of ever-growing locks doused in blonde, pin-straight highlights. And once a haircut’s namesake turns their back on the style, it’s likely only a matter of time before the rest of the world moves on, too, right?

Wrong. “The Rachel” endured.

Unlike Farrah Fawcett’s showstopping feathered hair from the ‘70s, celebrities, news anchors, and the average salon-goer were still wearing the hairstyle well into the 2000s. Even now, fashion websites will run the occasional “Is ‘The Rachel’ Making a Comeback?” article, complete with the latest Hollywood star to sport the familiar shag.
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It’s a testament to McMillan’s skill, Aniston’s charm, and Friends’s cultural sway over audiences that people are still discussing, and donning, the hairstyle some 25 years later. And in a lot of ways, the haircut's success mimicked the show's: it spawned plenty of imitators, but no one could outdo the original.