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.