Margaret Heldt died a few weeks ago at age 98, her legacy so assured it warranted a 16-paragraph obituary in The New York Times. And so well-deserved. For without her, the hairdos of legions of women, young and old, might have continued to stagnate within the confines of the page boy and ponytail of the 1950s.
For Ms. Heldt, you see, was the creator of the beehive β hair that had been backcombed into a smooth pile atop the head, then secured, sometimes for days, with an ample serving of hair spray.
First making an appearance, according to The Times, in the February 1960 pages of Modern Beauty Shop, the beehive was soon popping atop the famous heads of everyone from Barbra Streisand to Aretha Franklin.
Though described early on as a beehive, Heldt maintained her inspiration was really a fez cap of sorts, similar, I suppose, to the ones Shriners wear.
Because it was so hard to maintain, women sometimes kept their beehives in place with everything from scarves to strands of toilet paper when retiring for the night, leading Heldt to reportedly say, βI donβt care what your husband does from the neck down, but I donβt want him to touch you from the neck up.β
Egads, who would want to?
I must confess, I never wore the beehive back in the β60s, dabbling, instead, with everything from the bubble to the flip β which was essentially a bubble flipped up at the ends.
But no matter the hairstyle, we all relied on plenty of backcombing β or ratting, as we called it β topped off with at least a third of a can of Aqua Net. These were hairdos impossible to comb out. All you could do was shampoo them out, hoping tiny nests of spiders didnβt tumble out, as predicted by our high school gym teachers.
The beehive, the bubble, the flip β none of them would have been possible, of course, without hair spray, something for which we have World War II to thank. Really.
According to numerous publications, during World War II the government paid researchers on how to best distribute insect spray to prevent malaria among the troops. Thus was born a pressurized aerosol can developed by none other than the U.S. Department of Agriculture. From there, it was just a quick jump to beauty suppliers, who in 1950 began offering sticky spray in a can.
Iβm assuming all the insecticide has long been removed. Nonetheless, I once stopped a roach dead in its tracks inside a kitchen drawer with a quick squirt of Aqua Net.
Even so, other ingredients were later found to be harmful in hair spray, including chlorofluorocarbons, which were eventually removed. But although many of the harmful compounds associated with hair spray are now gone, the jury is still out on some of its current ingredients, including propylene glycol, which may or may not cause cancer.
Hair spray can also erupt into fire when exposed to an open flame β a fact that forced a newspaper colleague of mine to ditch the hair spray in her purse before she was allowed entrance into Sun Devil Stadium, where Pope John Paul II was holding mass in 1987.
Considering the copious amounts of the stuff we once sprayed all around our heads everywhere from our bedrooms to our locker rooms, itβs a wonder we didnβt all spontaneously combust.
