The boar bristle brush and the old way
On learning, slowly, to brush hair the way my grandmother brushed hers — and what a hundred strokes a night actually does.
My grandmother brushed her hair for ten minutes every evening, at her dressing table, with a boar bristle brush she had owned for forty years. She would do, I now know, roughly a hundred strokes — fifty on each side, slow, with the brush starting at the roots and travelling all the way to the ends in a single continuous stroke.
I had thought of this, for most of my adult life, as a slightly old-fashioned ritual that had been replaced by better technology. The boar bristle brushes were, I had assumed, a relic. The hundred strokes were, I had assumed, a Victorian myth.
I now do this. Not exactly as she did, but close. Most evenings, ten minutes, the brush my mother gave me from her mother's dressing table. The hair I have at thirty-five is better than the hair I had at twenty-five, and the brush is part of why.
What the strokes actually do
They distribute the natural oils from the scalp down the length of the hair. The scalp produces these oils continuously. The oils are, in modern hair care, mostly washed away by shampoo. The hair then has no protection on its length, and the ends become dry and brittle.
The hundred strokes are the small daily redistribution. The brush picks up the oil at the root and carries it down. The hair, over weeks, becomes naturally conditioned in a way that no leave-in product has ever quite matched for me.
On the brush itself
It has to be real boar bristle. The synthetic brushes do not pick up the oils the same way. A good boar bristle brush will cost between forty and a hundred euros and will last, with reasonable care, for forty years. The cost-per-year is very low. The cost-per-use, over decades of daily use, is almost nothing.
What the ritual is, besides hair care
It is a ten-minute slowing-down at the end of the day. The brushing requires no thought. The arm moves; the brush moves; the hair, slowly, becomes a calmer version of itself. The mind, during the ten minutes, does what minds do in the evening — wanders, settles, sometimes drifts onto a small worry and then off it. The ritual is, in my evening, the bridge between the day and sleep.
If you have not tried this, find a boar bristle brush. Ten minutes a night. After a month the hair will tell you whether to continue.