Powdered wigs and the hair-powder tax
From Wigipedia, the free hair encyclopedia
The powdered wig, or periwig, ruled the heads of fashionable European men for well over a century. It began as damage control — when King Louis XIV of France started losing his hair, the court adopted wigs, because the court adopted whatever the king did — and grew into an elaborate marker of rank, wealth, and respectability.[citation needed]
Why powder?
Wigs were dressed with powder: finely ground starch, often scented with orris root or lavender. The powder lightened the wig to the fashionable white or pale grey, absorbed oils, and helped mask the smell of a hairpiece that did not get washed nearly often enough. Applying it was a messy production, which is exactly why a freshly powdered wig advertised that its owner had servants, leisure, and money to burn.
The tax that ended it
In 1795, with war against revolutionary France draining the treasury, the British government of William Pitt the Younger passed the Duty on Hair Powder Act. From 5 May, anyone wishing to use hair powder had to buy an annual certificate at the stamp office for one guinea.
The politics did the rest. Reformist Whigs, sympathetic to French ideas, mocked the men who paid up by calling them “guinea-pigs,” and pointedly cut their own hair short in the new “French” crop. Between the cost, the ridicule, and a fashion already turning toward natural hair, the powdered wig fell out of style within a few years.
A tax that long outlived the fashion
The levy was a brief hit — it raised around £200,000 in its first year — but its real legacy was hurrying the wig toward the exit. The tax itself lingered absurdly long after almost no one powdered their hair: by the 1850s only a few hundred people, mostly liveried servants, still paid it, and it was finally repealed in 1861.