Scientific Analysis of Early Modern Haircare Recipes

Stefan Hanß (Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History). Generously funded by a John Rylands Research Institute Pilot Grant (2020–2021).

This interdisciplinary and international project conducts scientific analysis of haircare recipes and the material culture of haircare in early modern Germany. Generously funded by a John Rylands Research Institute Pilot Grant (2020–2021), Hanß leads a collaboration with material scientists from the University of York and from Rehovot, Israel, to sample and analyse the biochemical fingerprints of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German users of medical and cosmetic haircare recipes. Early modern subjects, this research shows, engaged with a highly creative and experimental material culture of hairdressing that was driven by medical understandings of the body and a globally connected material world.

Results will be published in a journal article that is currently in press.