How Old Are Organic Hair Dyes For Quite Unnatural Colours?

One of the most wonderful aspects of modern organic shampoos, conditioners and other haircare products is that a lot of products that conventional wisdom suggests could only be made using synthetic ingredients can be made with exclusively naturally derived compounds.

For example, purple shampoo, designed to stop the brassy tones that come from blonde and other light colour dye jobs, can be achieved without the need for synthetic purple dyes.

Vibrant purples are also available as part of our Pure Mineral Eye Shadow, showing that even the brightest colours do not necessarily rely on synthetic dyes.

This is not only untrue now thanks to the power of modern technology that allows for effective blending and mixing, but it has never truly been true even for hair dyes.

Whilst the modern wave of exotic and vibrant hair dyes is relatively modern, and the most popular brands do rely on synthetic dyes, there have been thousands of years of tradition of dying hair, and even rather unnatural colours have been added to hair for at least four centuries but likely far longer than this.

A Brief History Of Modern Hair

Like a lot of beauty products, hair dye has its roots at the very beginning of civilisation, with the earliest examples of recipes dating as far back as 2177 BC. Using cassia and leeks, the Mesopotamians could dye grey hair and eyebrows. 

Similarly, the Ebers Papyrus of Ancient Egypt, one of the oldest medical texts to have survived largely complete, has concoctions that can help restore the colour to greying hair and eyebrows as an alternative to using horsehair wigs.

Whilst the wearing of wigs was common in Ancient Egypt due to the connection between hairlessness and cleanliness, it was not necessarily ubiquitous, as hair dye was used alongside wigs, which presumably would have used a very different dying process to natural hair,

Alongside these, ancient civilisations used henna, indigo, turmeric, senna, red ochre, gooseberry and the hulls of black walnuts amongst many other ingredients throughout the classical period of history from Mesopotamia through to the fall of Rome.

A little bit later on, a Greek historian, Diodorus of Sicily, described how the Celts dyed their hair using quicklime as part of a passage filled with nothing but awe for the Gauls. 

This is a borderline case, as whilst calcium oxide is naturally derived, it would hardly be considered a natural ingredient in terms of the way it harmonised with the human body, and it would be a relatively harsh way to dye hair by modern standards.

Regardless, it serves to highlight just how common hair colouring was not only during ancient times but throughout human history, even during the middle ages and medieval periods where a lot of ancient traditions and technologies had been lost due to the sudden collapse of empires.

The first book that focuses extensively on hair dye, Trotula’s De Ornatu Mulierum, which translates to “Treatise On Women’s Cosmetics”. Alongside other makeup and skincare tips dating to the 12th century, it also featured many different recipes for bleaching and colouring hair.

Even though the formulae did work effectively, they were still limited to blonde and black hair. However, they did offer several natural solutions in an age where more synthetic compounds were harder to come by.

Given the popularity of this book, it is easy to make the assumption that there were no outlandish and exotic colours at all in natural hair dyes of the era, but that assumption would be sorely mistaken.

In 1661, the anthology Eighteen Books on the Secrets of Art and Nature goes even further than any of the previous haircare treatises and explores not only brown, black and blonde hair but colours that are not typically found at birth.

These include dyes for green hair, bright red hair, gold and white hair, all undertaken using natural ingredients, and several of which have distinctly unnatural results.

Rather unusually, green hair is achieved using the distilled water from capers, the edible buds from the Flinders rose bush that is more commonly used today for culinary purposes.

All of this highlights that whilst many outlandish hairstyles and colours were the result of wigs and artificial hair, in other cases it was natural materials that were used to dye the hair somewhat unnatural colours, with other options available but presumably limited by cost.

It would take until the 20th century for synthetic hair dyes to be created, and after the Second World War for home colourings to become a commonly available product.