Hair Removal and Hair Dyeing: Cosmetics in the Medieval Middle East, between Pharmacy and Hadith

In the Islamic world, both men and women are required to deal with their hair in specific ways, such as covering the head or wearing a beard. This paper will not be dealing with these but with two topics that appear not only in religious literature but also in pharmacological writings: the removal of body hair and the dyeing of the hair of one's head (including the beard) using hadith collections and pharmacopoeia. Previous studies of hair and hair care in Islamic societies have largely focused on legal texts; the purpose of this paper is to add the recipes for hair dyes and depilatory pastes to the conversation, asking: how did people actually color or remove hair? The pharmacological material at my disposal is limited; given the later texts' extensive quotation of earlier ones, I will be moving back and forth between Abbasid Baghdad and Mamluk Cairo in my citation of hadith and recipes alike. The topic of dyeing the hair of the head and beards seems to have not yet received an actual academic discussion, at least not a historicizing one.