A History of Hair Mousse

You might be surprised to learn that hairstyling mousse only goes back to the mid 1980s. Mousse has been such a cultural presence, whether in original foam form or the now much more preferred gel that it seems to have always existed. In fact, there was an attempt at marketing hair mousse in the 1970s. It was officially called Breck Salon Hair Finishing Formula and it is quite possible that its ungainly name contributed to its rapid disappearance off store shelves and not in the good way. More likely is the fact that the let it all hang out hair styling of the 1970s just wasn't really as conducive to the properties of mousse as the conservatively coiffed milieu of Ronnie Raygun's Mourning in America. Leave it to the folks at L'Oreal to have better timing than the folks at Breck.

George Orwell saw 1984 as a time in which freedom was no longer held by the average citizen. L'Oreal, on the other hand, saw 1984 as the perfect moment in time to introduced Free Hold, the first successful hair mousse. It is important to understand that prior to Free Hold and the introduction of styling mousse that all those women from the 1960s who had hair that didn't even move during the fatally high winds of Hurricane Camille had been forced to go through a long, wicked process of lacquering at a hair salon. The fact is that until L'Oreal changed the world forever in 1984, sculpting hair was nearly as torturous a process as thawing meat had been before the microwave. The only hair product that had come in aerosol cans was hair spray. Women, and some men, knew exactly how to handle that. But when they first picked up a can of Free Hold in 1984 and attempted to do the same as they had been used to doing with hair spray, well, things got very ugly. The foam shot out all over the room. Other people returned cans because they thought it was defective. It was, as those crazy Arabian kids like to sing, a whole new world.

Mousse caught on mainly because the timing was right. The wild dry look of long straggly hair that that had marked the 70s was over; men were ready to look conservative again in order to fit with the new ideological consensus. But whereas the short hair styles previous to the mid-1960s had been dominated by Brylcream and Dapper Dan pomade, the New Traditionalists wanted short hair but without going back to the wet look. Mousse stepped up to the plate quite nicely. Mousse made managing short hair easy and came without the trappings of stepping back into time and looking like their Old Traditionalist fathers and grandfathers. Even better was the science of hair mousse which not only blew a raspberry, but also gave the finger to the Mr. Science's contention that no hair product could possibly break Newton's Fifteenth Law: You cannot have hair that has both body and manageability at the same time. It had long been the bane of the hair care product industry. How to give one's hair both a full bodied appearance and also at the same allow it to be shaped, coiffed, sculpted, and styled. It could not be done. Those lacquered B-52s of the 1960s proved that this rule was inviolate. But what Newton never figured on was that chemistry would ride astride a cavalry horse and rescue the men and women of the 1980s from this apparent contradiction.

Electrically charged polymers. It was those polymers that did the trick. Mousse inventors used chemistry to combine negatively charged polymers with positively charged polymers. The negative polymers in hair mousse took care of the job of giving the hair body, while the positive polymers gave the hair that healthy shine and allowed it to be free from blowing in the wind. Hair sprays, by contrast, possessed polymers that had not benefited from being electrically charged. The difference is in the comb. When a comb was run through hair that had been sprayed, the polymers left with the tines. On the other hand, when a comb was run through hair that had been moussed, the polymers stay put. The resulting difference is still on display in a thousand music videos made in 1984.