Shampoo

HISTORY 

The ancient Egyptians used a mixture of water and citrus juice to wash their hair.

Moses gave the Israelites detailed laws governing personal cleanliness. He also related cleanliness to health and religious purification. Biblical accounts suggest that the Israelites knew that mixing ashes and oil produced a kind of hair gel.

Originally, soap and shampoo were very similar products; both containing the same naturally derived surfactants, a type of detergent. Indded a physician in 385 AD recommended soap as good for shampooing.

A detergent shampoo that appeared in the Middle Ages involved boiling water and soap with soda or potash. This produced a mixture with a high concentration of negatively charged hydroxllons, the basis of modern day shampoo.

By the 1300s some European women were conditioning their hair with dead lizards boiled in olive oil. Egg whites were used to give hair body and stiffness.

The word shampoo entered the English language from India during the colonial era. It dates to 1762, and is derived from Hindi chāmpo, itself derived from the Sanskrit root capayati, which means to press, knead, soothe.

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Sake Dean Mahomed, a Bengali traveller, surgeon, and entrepreneur, is credited with introducing the practice of champooi or "shampooing" to Britain when he opened some baths on Brighton sea front in 1821. He claimed he was "the inventor of the Indian Medicated Vapour Baths…by whom the Art of Shampooing was first introduced into England in 1784." King George IV gave Mahomed a royal warrant and appointed him Shampooing Surgeon to The King.

Before the invention of mass-marketed hair care products, households were pretty much on their own concocting family shampoos and conditioners. This suggestion was published in The New England Economical Housekeeper and Family Receipt Book in 1847: "Perhaps the best of all shampoos is the yolk of an egg beaten up with a pint of soft warm water. Apply at once and rinse off with castille or other hard white soap."

Hair salons in Britain in the 1870s concocted their own shampoos from varying amounts of water, soda, and bar soap.

In 1898, Hans Schwarzkopf, a qualified chemist in Berlin, opened a tiny drugstore with a perfume section. Schwarzkopf disliked the expensive oils and harsh soaps used to wash hair and his solution was a violet-scented powder shampoo that dissolves in water. He started selling it in 1903 and the shampoo was an instant hit with his customers.

In 1927, the first liquid shampoo was invented by Hans Schwarzkopf in Berlin, whose name created a shampoo brand sold in Europe.

Picture below shows bottles of shampoo and lotions manufactured in the early 20th century by the C.L. Hamilton Co. of Washington, D.C.

The first successful retail shampoo was created in 1930 by Dr. John H. Breck, Sr in Springfield, Massachusetts. Thought to be the first pH-balanced shampoo in history, Breck was initially sold only in local New England beauty salons.

In 1936, son Edward J. Breck (1907–1993) assumed management of Breck Shampoo. He immediately collaborated with portrait painter Charles Sheldon to bring a new form of advertising to the company. Their "Breck Girls" pastel portraits started running in 1936 and eventually became one of the country's longest-running advertising campaigns. Breck girls have included Patti Boyd, Cheryl Tiegs, Cybill Shepherd, Jaclyn Smith,  Kim Basinger, Brooke Shields and Farrah Fawcett.

Breck was the first manufacturer to present the public with a shampoo line for dry and oily hair. Advertising that "every woman is different," by the 1950s, the shampoo was available in three expressions, color-coded for easy identity.

Though synthetic shampoos were introduced in the 1930s, daily shampooing only becoming the norm in the 1970s and 1980s.

FUN SHAMPOO FACTS

In order to become a Shampoo Technician in Tennessee, you must obtain 300 hours of instruction in the practice and theory of shampooing.

A Q-Tip dipped in shampoo and rubbed into the area where a zipper is caught on a jacket can get it unstuck.

The instruction "rinse and repeat" on the shampoo bottle is not a gimmick to sell more shampoo. In fact, to get the same lather on one attempt requires more shampoo than using a small amount on the first application to rid the dirt without lather and then achieving lather on the second.

The suds of shampoo and many other foaming products are often artificially added to the product to help convince us that it is working.

Sources Schwarzkopf, Inventors.about