Dry shampoo in 1910: the powders of the pre-shower era

1910. A middle-class house in London. There is a bathroom, perhaps, but hot water is heated in the kitchen and carried upstairs. Washing long hair takes an afternoon and a fire to dry it by. Most women do it once a month. Some, less.

In between, there is powder.

The recipes were printed in household manuals and beauty columns. Cornstarch or rice powder as the base. Powdered orris root — the dried rhizome of the iris — for its faint violet scent. Sometimes fuller's earth, a fine clay, for oily hair. Sometimes borax.

The method was methodical. The hair was let down and sectioned. The powder was sprinkled at the roots or blown in with a rubber puffer. It was left for ten minutes to absorb oil. Then came the brushing, which was the real cleaning: a stiff boar-bristle brush drawn from root to tip, over and over, until the powder and the grease came out together.

Commercial versions followed. By the 1940s, a product called Minipoo sold dry shampoo in a box with a mitt for applying it. The idea was not new. The packaging was.

Hair in this period was built up — the Gibson girl pompadour, the full Edwardian roll, often padded with a 'rat' made of the wearer's own saved hair. Powder added volume and grip. A freshly washed head was too slippery to pin.

Powder was not just hygiene. It was time. It let a woman look kept without the hours a wash required. It belonged to the long era between the pitcher and the shower — when cleanliness was something you performed with a brush, by lamplight, every night.