- Andrew Rapoza
- Sep 2, 2024
- 7 min read
Updated: May 16, 2025
Part 1 of 3: THE BEAR
I shave in the dark.
I don’t need to turn the light on because I know where everything is on my face. My nose and lips and ears haven’t changed position since a razor blade first touched the peach fuzz between them almost a lifetime ago.
Besides, I don’t like turning on the lights because there’s always an old man staring back at me in the mirror and, each time I look at him, he has less and less hair on the top of his head. It’s really scary.
Even when I’m not looking, I know he’s still there. After I got home from the Houston24 bottle show, I suddenly realized that the three promising cures I had purchased there shared one thing in common – they had all promised to grow hair on bald heads. The old man mocked me with a wry grin as I uncomfortably realized my Freudian slip.
I turned off the lights but it didn’t help. The face in the mirror had already cursed me with the legacy of my ancestors: male pattern baldness.
A shiver came over me as a flock of goosebumps landed where hair once grew.
But I understand now it was all meant to be. These three baldness cures I had purchased are ancient artifacts that prove many hair-challenged people just like me have fought the good fight to get their hair back. Though none of them will bring back my hair, their stories will help us feel the hope and hear the moans of balding souls from long ago.
1600s – All Creatures of our God and King
In 1653 the renowned British botanist Nicholas Culpeper thought he had it all figured out. He combined his study of plants with the movements of constellations – botany and astrology – and wrote books on medicine in English instead of Latin so that they could be read by commoners rather than just the elite. His medicines also made sense to them: using parts of plants and animals they could get themselves, they could make their own cures – Nature was their pharmacy.
Among these natural wonders were ingredients that seemed to make up for the patient’s pain or illness; for example, ear pain could be cured using grease rendered from a fox, the elusive woodlands creature recognized for its keen hearing. Similarly, Culpeper attributed the power to grow hair to the hairy bear, “Bear’s Grease staies [stops] the falling off of the hair.”
In 1674 John Josselyn explored the colonies in New England and came to the same conclusion that the fat of some wild animals had curative properties: raccoon and wildcat grease were both excellent for bruises and aches, he wrote, and “Bear’s Grease is very good for aches and cold swellings, the Indians anoint themselves therewith from top to toe, which hardens them against the cold weather.”
Bears were covered with fur (not hair, technically) but they were also big and brutishly strong and therefore became the prime target for their fat to be exploited for gaining strength and growing hair. Fur or hair, you’ve never seen a timid or bald bear.
1700s – Hair Makes the Man
The 18th century was not a good time to be a bear. It was the age of powdered wigs, those expensive status symbols of the elite who could afford them, but the periwigs, or wigs for short, also hid the bald patches that were frequently showing up because their wearers had contracted syphilis. Other toiletries, like perfumery and tooth care products, got attention too, but shopkeepers focused on selling what was in greatest demand – hair products. In 1793, William Caton of Annapolis, Maryland, modestly listed his tooth supplies: “Tooth Brushes, Tooth Powder, of all sorts, and Tooth Picks,” but the rest of his advertisement exploded with items for pampering wigs and real hair:
Hair-Pins, Rollers, Pinching, Craping, Curling and Cold Irons; Powder Knives, Hair Scissors, Hair Ribbon, Powder Baggs, Swandown and Silk Puffs, of all kinds; Powder Boxes, Tortoise Shell, Horn and Ivory Combs; and infallible Pomatum, that will nourish the hair, make it grow thick and long, and preserve it to extreme old age [and] a large quantity of BEAR’s GREASE, that will thicken the hair, and hasten the growth thereby, nourish it at the roots, and prevent it from turning gray.
The best bear’s grease was said to come from brown bears and especially those from Russia (wild and free-range promised stronger, healthier bears, apparently, and therefore more potent, hair-growing, strengthening, beautifying grease). Bear’s grease was also heavily perfumed because a bear’s potent smell (and the stink of its fat that would quickly become rancid) has never been confused with daffodils in the springtime.
“Genuine” was the key promise in its advertising because the availability of bears was quickly outstripped by the surging purchases of their grease; consequently, pig fat was often sold as bear’s grease, even under the promise of “Genuine.” In 1760 James Cox of London promised that the bear’s grease he sold was “the real Thing” (predating the Coca Cola slogan by a few hundred years). In fairness, it was no less real than the horsehair and yak hair wigs adorning the heads of the wealthy – it was all one great big coverup.
The sale of bear’s grease increased even more when an expensive tax on hair powder was imposed in 1795, forcing many to abandon their wigs and work on improving their own hair. As they entered the next century, wigs were slowly abandoned (except in British courtrooms), leaving bear’s grease to become the big hope for a good-looking head of dark, thick, strong hair.
1800s – Barely Bear
In the first quarter of the new century, competition for the sale of bear’s grease became thicker than bear’s hair; proprietors frequently made extravagant promises for their brand of bear’s grease and shopkeepers sometimes fought tooth and claw for balding customers to buy at their establishments. The saga of Mr. Macalpine and Mr. Money (yes, their real names) dramatically illustrated the competition as well as the importance of bear’s grease sales. Both hairdressers had shops on London’s Threadneedle Street; its name made it sound like some narrow, forgotten alley, but it was in the heart of London and one of their neighbors was no less than the Bank of England. In 1824, The Morning Chronicle reported that the “rival friseurs” were summoned to appear in court, each for keeping a live bear at their shop, “which were not sufficiently secured to prevent danger of annoyance to the public.”
Each did so, the article stated, to prove to their customers that their bear’s grease products were “genuine … not scented suet or hog’s lard” or any other adulteration. But the rival hairdressers were not harmless advertisements – they both had real, live, snarling, wild bears in their shops, just a paw swipe away from the gawking public:
Numerous complaints were made to the Lord Mayor of the conduct of these animals, and of their masters, in disturbing the whole street by their noise and contest. The bears attracted multitudes round the doors [of the two hairdresser’s shops], which blocked up the thoroughfare. One of [the bears] could put his leg or arm out to its full extent and seize any [passer-by] with its claws.” One of the bears also filled the area with its “hideous howls … at midnight particularly.”
The wild beasts of the woods had become dangerous attention-getters in a major London thoroughfare, all to promote their allegedly curative body fat for bald heads and thinning hair.
Around 1830, bear’s grease began to be uniformly packaged in the same type of shallow, glazed earthenware pots that were being used for other thick, cream-style toiletries and medicines, like toothpaste, cold cream, shaving cream, and eye ointment. The bear’s grease pot lids were illustrated with a wide assortment of ursine quadrupeds, ranging from cartoonish, almost cuddly versions muzzled and chained into submission (although notably the chain’s end was seldom secured) to fierce beasts being
shot by hunters or attacked by packs of dogs. Some illustrations made it doubtful the artist had ever seen a real bear, but bear’s grease sold very well despite the occasional physiological guesswork.
Reserves of bear’s grease continued to grow thinner than the balding heads that wanted it, so suspicions and accusations of adulteration became rampant. By 1855 it was being claimed that virtually no real bear’s grease was any longer to be found in those promisingly decorated pots, and that some shopkeepers were going through extraordinary lengths to cover up the big lie about their “bear’s grease”:
… ninety-nine of every hundred pots of bear’s grease are obtained exclusively from the pig, and have no connection whatever with the bear. … The fact is, that bear’s grease may be described as lard, plus perfume; that is all. … Every now and then, the carcass of a bear was seen hung up at their shop-doors, and the attention of the spectators drawn to it by enormous placards, gorgeous in all the colours of the rainbow.
But the reader must not be deceived, as were the passers-by, and imagine that the suspended animal was really a bear. No; the hairdresser knows the value of bears too well for that. He therefore keeps a bear-skin on the premises, buys a nice large fat hog, puts it into the bear-skin, advertises – “Another fine bear to be slaughtered at Jones’s tomorrow,” and next day hangs up the pig by his hind legs.
Bear’s grease fell out of popularity in the last quarter of the century as the competition for consumer dollars continued to grow and new types of hair products were presented as improvements on the old-fashioned notion of bear’s grease, which had become widely suspected of being anything but “the real thing.”
Postscript
I came home from the show with my prized bear’s grease pot lid (pictured above) – something I had always wanted to add to my collection of health history antiques – but I have since learned that it is a reproduction – like the grease it promised to contain, even my container is not the real thing. That’s okay though – it’s symbolic of a fascinating, promising cure … and I’m glad it doesn’t have any bear’s grease inside – that’s something I definitely would not want to smell after two hundred years.
For more on bear’s grease, see:
PROMISING CURES,
Vol.1, Prologue: Poking and Prodding
Next week: Part 2 of 3: THE COCONUT
