The blue-haired ladies of old-time Phoenix


When I was a kid I remember hearing the phrase "blue-haired lady", which of course made no sense to me. And it wasn't until just a few years ago that the Woman in my Life was able to explain it to me.

It has to do with something called bluing, which makes grey hair look less yellowish, and gives it a more attractive, silvery look. Well, just a bit of it. Too much, of course, can change that wonderful silverly look to, well, making your hair look blue.

My understanding is that a touch of bluing is still used nowadays for ladies who choose not to dye their hair after a certain age. Of course as a typical man I know nothing about this stuff, and the mysteries of women's hair, and clothes, remain as distant as the discussion of quasars to me.

If you follow me here, being a blue-haired lady isn't something that you, as a woman, wanted to be. No, it had nothing to do with having grey hair, which is fine, it simply had to do with a lack of finesse. Other women can be very harshly critical, and if you've made a mistake with your hair, you'll either hear about it directly, or hear about it because someone was talking behind your back!

Whether these nice ladies in the photo at the top of this post (which was taken at the Insane Asylum, at 24th Street and Van Buren, by the way) had access to hair dye, or bluing, I have no idea. As the years went on, of course, women did. By the twenties making your hair platinum was all the rage, and so on.

With age comes wisdom, but not necessarily blue hair.
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