Shiny Internet Stuff

Writers are intellectual packrats.    Set one down in a used book store or a library sale, and he or she is likely to come away with a history of carrier pigeons in World War I, a Peruvian vegetarian cookbook (in Spanish), and five non-consecutive volumes of The Bobbsey Twins . . . all on the grounds that “they might come in handy someday.”

Their browser bookmark lists are equally eclectic — you never know, after all, what information you might turn out to need.  Today’s interesting find:  a YouTube video by a woman whose passion is historical-recreationist hairdressing; in this one, she first dissects and then re-creates the complex seven-braid hairstyle of the Roman Vestal Virgins (and Roman brides, but they only had to wear it for one day instead of all the time.)

She doesn’t speculate on the maintenance of the hairstyle — and it’s not the sort of thing that the ancient Roman primary sources, being written by men, would have bothered to talk, or even think, about — but just from looking at the way the hair was first braided and then put up, I’d guess that the multiple braids were done once or twice a month (or week, or whatever — I’m not an expert on braid-care), and then the style itself was put up in the morning and taken down again at night.

One thought on “Shiny Internet Stuff

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.