20 Bizarre Grooming Rules Men Were Once Forced To Follow

In July 1645, Prince Regent Dorgon, who ruled China for the Manchus after the conquest, decreed that all adult Han Chinese men must shave the front of their heads and braid the remainder of their hair into a long braid, or queue, in imitation of Manchu military fashion. To Confucian Chinese, hair was considered a gift from one’s forebears, so cutting it would be sacrilege. Failure to obey the decree was considered an act of treason and punishable by death. It remained the law until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911.

Tsar Peter the Great sought to bring Russia in line with Western Europe by having men shave their long beards. In September 1698, he ordered men to shave off their beards, personally cutting the beards of court nobles with his own shears. But the beards kept growing back, so in 1705 the tsar imposed a tax of up to 100 rubles on nobles and merchants, giving a stamped token reading “Money Taken” to those who paid. Peasants had to pay only a toll at city gates.

In Britain, the Queen’s Regulations of 1860 made shaving the upper lip an offense with a specified punishment, and every soldier and officer was required to wear a mustache. It has been suggested that this rule was a result of the influence of British officers serving in colonial India, where facial hair was considered to symbolize authority. Reissued as King’s Regulations Paragraph 1695 in 1906, the rule stated that “the chin and the under-lip will be shaved, but not the upper lip,” and that anyone found violating the rule would be subject to a court-martial or imprisonment. The regulation was lifted in October 1916.

Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, organized an order of dedicated followers known as the Khalsa on April 13, 1699, in Anandpur Sahib. He imposed a strict code of behavior on these Sikhs that became known as the Five Ks. One of the rules, Kesh, dictated that no male initiated Sikh was to ever cut or remove any hair from his body since it was considered God’s gift. Each Sikh had to carry a small wooden comb, the Kangha, tucked away in his hair, which he would comb twice a day before wrapping his head with a turban. Any man caught cutting his hair was stripped of his Khalsa status.

When Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate from 1603 to 1868, all samurai had to have their front crown shaved or plucked off (the look was called sakayaki), and have the rest of their hair oiled into a topknot that was folded forward. The look initially started out as a way to help keep their heavy iron war helmets cooler and more secure during battle, but soon became an expected status symbol for anyone of warrior class. If you showed up without your samurai haircut, you’d be in serious trouble. It was only abolished after the issuance of the 1871 Haircutting Edict.

In 1853, Charles Dickens, the renowned British novelist, published an essay titled “Why Shave?” in one of his own magazines, echoing a medical theory that was common at the time. Doctors, writing in journals such as The Lancet, contended that facial hair acted as a filter to prevent coal smoke and germs from reaching the lungs, and that shaving led to tuberculosis. In health manuals, the growth of a full beard was presented as a hygienic obligation. This was Victorian convention, not science.

For a long time, the Church regulated the length of a priest’s hair. The tonsure mandated that every male entering the Catholic priesthood or monastic orders shave the top portion of his head, leaving only a band of hair to mimic the crown of thorns worn by Christ. This rejected worldliness and pride and set Catholic clergymen apart from both lay people and bearded Orthodox priests. The tonsure was finally abolished by Pope Paul VI in 1972.

A law attributed to Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus stipulated that boys under the age of 20 should wear their hair short, but upon completion of the grueling training regimen called the agoge at about age 20, male Spartan citizens were obliged to wear it long. In preparation for battle, the hoplites would sit in groups, oiling, combing, and braiding their hair as a sign of courage and equanimity in the face of death. The men of King Leonidas are said to have done just this before setting out for Thermopylae.

It wasn’t until June 24, 1869, that a circular from the Admiralty informed RN men that they no longer had to shave their faces when exposed to cold water. From then on, they could be bearded if they sported “a full set” of facial hair: a beard and mustache. They were not to wear a mustache only, a beard only, or a beard or mustache on only part of their face, and if they had any patchiness about them, they would have to revert to being clean-shaven. The mustache alone was not authorised in the RN until 1892.

In 1828 and 1829, the reformist Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II ordered Ottoman bureaucrats and military officials to abandon the turban in favor of a red, brimless fez. The sultan also ordered all Ottoman officials to cut their facial hair, stating that a beard should not protrude from the chin by more than two finger widths and that a mustache should not exceed the width of the eyebrows. The aim was to make all Ottoman civil servants look alike and modern.

For the majority of the Tudor and Elizabethan eras, a man’s uncut beard was considered uncivilized. As courtly convention required that beards be shaped into various forms (a broad spade, a pointy stiletto, or a roundish rubbing brush), they were typically held in place using wax or starch. Every night, the facial hair was rolled up in linen strips or fastened beneath the chin with a wooden holder to maintain its appearance throughout the night. This was the trend as William Harrison described it in 1587, and as Robert Greene detailed in 1592.

In Easter 1105, Bishop Serlo of Séez preached before Henry I of England against the vanity of long hair, citing a ban on long-haired men entering churches made at the Council of Rouen nine years earlier. Henry accepted this immediately, so Serlo cut the hair of the king and everyone else in his court with a pair of iron shears right there in the church.

In 692 AD, the Byzantine emperor Justinian II called a church council in Constantinople. There, they passed Canon 96, declaring it sinful vanity for any man to shave or trim his beard and hair to alter his appearance, because such things defaced the image of God in which man was made. It declared full, untrimmed beards required on all Eastern Orthodox clergy, monks, and pious laymen, and condemned shaving as an effeminate Western practice. This decree would be the source of a rift between the Orthodox and the clean-shaven Catholic clergy for centuries to come.

The 1852 Uniform Regulations for the US Navy allowed men to wear short sideburns that did not extend more than two inches below the ears, but mustaches were forbidden, and the Navy’s leadership insisted they should never be worn “on any pretense whatever.” Mustaches, as well as pointed, “imperial” beards, were believed to signal radical European agitators and foreign officers. Secretary of the Navy James C. Dobbin eased the regulations in the mid-1850s, and commanders in northern latitudes might allow beards to grow longer in frigid water.

A gentleman in the 18th century would never have been seen in a public setting without his head powdered pure white. From London drawing rooms to the American colonies, barbers would coat the hair, be it a wig or the wearer’s own, with pomatum, a sticky, scented preparation of animal fat, before blowing wheat starch or flour through the hair using hand bellows inside powdering closets. The 1795 tax on hair powder levied by British prime minister William Pitt the Younger put an end to the style.

Cecil B. Hartley’s gentleman’s etiquette book of 1860 claimed that nails should be kept short, clean, and neatly clipped as proof of gentility, and should be washed every morning with the hand-brush, soap, and water, and cut regularly with a pair of small scissors. But any such activity done in public view, filing or clipping at the dinner table, or anywhere in public, was a vulgarity and a breach of good manners.

In about 200 BC, one of Rome’s greatest generals, Scipio Africanus, who later famously defeated Hannibal, introduced the practice of daily clean shaving to his army, and his fellow commanders soon followed suit. There was good reason, too: if you had a beard, your enemy could grab it and use it as a lever to pull your head down so that you were open to a fatal stab wound in the face. Soldiers were given their morning shave by their army barber using a sharp razor made of bare iron, lubricated only with water or oil. The fashion remained for a while until 117 AD, when the Emperor Hadrian started wearing a beard again.

The Greek historian Herodotus tells us, in his writings on ancient Egypt, that priests had to shave off every hair from their bodies, including the scalp, eyebrows, and eyelashes, with bronze razors every two or three days as part of their religious duties. This was to maintain ritual purity. They couldn’t risk any stray hairs or even a louse being found on a sacred offering. Pharaohs, on the other hand, wore ceremonial false metal beards instead of growing real ones.

By the 1950s, hair codes were written directly into the code of conduct at American high schools, private schools, and universities: Hair was to be trimmed above the ears and off the collar, in standard styles such as the crew cut, flat-top, or Ivy League, usually held back with hair cream. A boy with long hair or a “ducktail” was suspended, sent to the barber, and not allowed back in school until the job was done.

When the U.S. entered World War One in 1917, General John J. Pershing was commander of the American Expeditionary Forces. Army chemists found that facial hair and stubble could break a gas mask’s seal, letting mustard or phosgene gas reach the skin. Troops were ordered to shave their lower faces smooth every morning before field duty, though a small mustache was still allowed if it stayed clear of the seal. More than 3.5 million safety razor kits were distributed to troops.

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