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Domna, a late-second century/early-third century empress, had a bewitching, gravity-defying hairstyle. On that day at WAM, Stephens developed an obsession with the back of Julia Domna’s head. If you can’t see the back of the head, you’re never going to figure out the hairstyle.”
“Since I’m a hairdresser, I stand behind people’s heads all day,” said Stephens.
But at WAM, the ancient busts sat in the middle of the room, so Stephens was able to get a good look at the back of their heads. In most museum setups, portrait busts line the walls elevated above eye level, as if they’re looking down at visitors. Stephens wasn’t particularly interested in antiquities before a 2001 visit to Baltimore’s the Walters Art Museum. She doesn’t have a Ph.D., she doesn’t read Greek or Latin, but she’s blown the academy’s collective mind with historical discoveries made in her basement. Her revolutionary observations about women in antiquity are the result of pure grunt work. In her videos, Stephens plays the part of ornatrix for her hair models, using as-authentic-as-possible hair tools like horn combs and bone needles. No evidence exists that public, for-pay hair salons, like the one where Stephens works, existed in ancient Rome. Poor women likely employed friends or sisters to do their hair. She focuses mostly on the hairstyles of Roman women in the first century A.D.įew examples of ancient women’s hairstyling practices remain - given their feminine and quotidian nature, few were ever even recorded - but it is known that slaves called ornatrices styled rich women’s hair at home. Stephens styles hair at Baltimore’s Studio 921, but she’s better known outside of her hometown for tutorials faithfully re-creating historical updos on YouTube. You can tell that hairdresser/archaeologist/YouTube personality Janet Stephens is an unusual woman by her choice of reading material: “I read Vogue and Bazaar for work, and I read scholarly work for entertainment,” she says. See Stephens at work and hear WSJ reporter Abigail Pesta tell the story in the video below.Hairdresser-archaeologist Janet Stephens is known for styling ancient updos, like Faustina the Younger’s pictured here. Stephens is now a recognized authority on ancient hairstyles and a “hair archaeologist.” In 2008, she published an article in the Journal of Roman Archaeology detailing her findings on Roman hair. The single-prong pins couldn’t have held the intricate styles in place. Translators generally went with “hairpin.” Acus has several meanings including a “single-prong hairpin” or “needle and thread,” she says. Stephens says, she realized the Latin term “acus” was probably being misunderstood in the context of hairdressing. Studying translations of Roman literature, Ms.
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This set off Stephens’ skeptic detector, and-armed with no more than her free time, some dogged research methods, and a few volunteer models-she ventured to disprove the scholarly consensus. She undertook some research and found that scholars generally assumed that the elaborate, sculpted hairstyles of Roman ladies could only be wigs. Stephens first set about trying the empress’s hairstyle on a mannequin, with no success. Captivated by the philosopher empress’s hairdo, she thought “holy cow, that is so cool… like a loaf of bread sitting on her head.” Thus began Stephens’ quest to recreate the coiffures of ladies of antiquity.
In 2001, Janet Stephens, a Baltimore hairdresser, caught sight of a bust of Roman empress Julia Domna at the Walters Art Museum (the image above is of a bust in the Louvre).