A hair-raising display of at least 50 ancient tweezers in addition to other bathing, beauty, and medicinal artifacts by a new museum in Wroxeter, a city of Roman Britain, zeroes in on some of the painful yet enduring hair removal methods and other meticulous hygiene practices adopted by Ancient Roman society.
Located about an hour outside of Birmingham, the Wroxeter Museum, which opened to the public on May 25, boasts an impressive collection of more than 400 artifacts that illustrate some of the day-to-day routines in Roman life, which includes the ancient empire’s strange obsession with hairlessness.
Despite their painful pinches, tweezers were a popular hair removal tool at the time, given their practical simplicity and low cost, according to researchers’ findings. Many Roman Britons preferred a “clean-shaven” appearance, according to English Heritage, the charity behind the new museum.
“It’s interesting to see this vogue for the removal of body hair around again after millennia for everyone,” English Heritage Curator Cameron Moffett said in a statement on the new exhibition. The tweezers in the collection date as early as the 2nd century to the early 5th century CE, Moffett explained to Hyperallergic.
“We know from authors of antiquity that in general women were expected to depilate to make themselves attractive to men, whereas with men it was much more to do with the aesthetic expected for those engaging in sports,” Moffett continued. He further explained how participants in popular sports that required little clothing, such as wrestling, “would have prepared themselves by removing all their visible body hair.”
Thankfully, modern hair removal methods are far less uncomfortable, Moffett noted (although this statement makes me personally question whether he has ever had his mustache threaded).
The majority of the tweezers were found in the area of the Wroxeter public baths complex, a popular community space that many Romans frequented daily with personalized cleaning sets, the curator explained. They frequently enlisted enslaved individuals to pluck their hair in order to avoid hairiness, a trait that was widely perceived as “barbaric,” according to English Heritage.
Roman politician and writer Seneca once complained in a letter to a friend about how hair-plucking caused a flurry of loud shrieks echoing from the communal baths. In his letter, Seneca described the “shrill” cries that “the skinny armpit hair-plucker” used to get community members’ attention, “except when he is doing his job and making someone else shriek for him” — a description that sounds uncannily similar to that of threading salons and waxing centers today.
English Heritage operates and cares for over 400 other historic buildings, monuments, and sites related to English history. The new museum stands alongside excavated ruins of Wroxeter Roman City, which English Heritage describes as “one of the best-preserved examples of a Roman town in Britain.” Known as Viriconium Cornoviorum at the time, the city was once the fourth largest in Roman Britain, roughly the size of Pompeii. In addition to the public baths, archaeological excavations have uncovered the town forum, market, and townhouses that made up this bustling community that was founded at the beginning of the 90s CE and existed until the mid-5th century.
In addition to the tweezers collection, the museum also features other historical objects, most of which have not been shown to the public before. These artifacts include strigils — oh-so-lovingly referred to as “skin scrapers” — ear scoops, nail cleaners, glass perfume and oil bottles, restrung necklaces with 1000 jet jewelry beads, copper eye make-up applicators, as well as protective amulets used to ward off evil spirits and promote fertility.