Decoding hair to sell soap

Thinking about hair and its various cultural and social associations made me wonder how the advertisers of hair products navigate this difficult semiotic terrain.

A bit of digging led me to Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, a former student of Lévi-Strauss who puts his background in structuralist anthropology and psychiatry to work for corporate marketers, through his company Archetype Discoveries Worldwide.

While Rapaille's ideas are grounded in a type of theory that would strike contemporary anthropologists as pretty old-fashioned, they seem to work for the purposes of advertising, which is a hit-or-miss form of cultural communication at the best of times.

Dr. Rapaille's approach is to collect the earliest personal memories of focus group participants with regards to a type of product. He then examines these personal narratives for recurring themes. By analyzing these themes, he "decodes" the collective emotional references of the product in the context of a given culture.

He was once asked to come to the rescue of a British shampoo manufacturer's failing Japanese ad campaign. A pdf of his "case study" can be downloaded here.



I first heard of Dr. Rapaille in a Frontline documentary on contemporary advertising, called "The Persuaders", in which he gave a very entertaining and convincing account of why a French cheesemaker's commercials were failing miserably in the US, and how he helped to turn the situation around.

You can watch the documentary here. Dr. Rapaille is featured in segment 4, "The Science of Selling". His case study on the cheese problem (which is better written than the shampoo one) is here.

Funny feelings about hair

Hair’s importance as a cultural symbol and as an object of shame and wonder has been widely discussed in the literature of anthropology and psychology. No one gets a BA in anthropology without reading (or at least pretending to have read) Sir Edmund Leach’s 1958 essay “Magical Hair” and maybe even Christopher Hallpike’s “Social Hair”, written in 1969.

But contemporary Dutch sculptor Chrystl Rijkeboer (a detail from whose 1999 installation Love is the devil appears at the head of this post) sums up the situation pretty nicely:

…hair has symbolic significance: beauty, strength, health, attraction, etcetera. The moment it is separated from the human all these factors turn around, hair is considered dirty, unsavoury and dead.

The use of hair in contemporary art is often contrived and facile. It’s a readily available material that guarantees a visceral response in the viewer. Rijkeboer’s work stands out, though. The most recent work on her site is from 2003. I wonder what she’s been up to since then.

I like Hrafnhildur Arnardottir’s (aka Shoplifter) work too. This Icelandic artist uses hair – mostly synthetic, I believe – in sculptures ranging in form from Ikebana to braid murals. She is also responsible for the elaborate hairpiece worn by Bjork in the photos for her album Medulla.



She may be referring to a traditional Icelandic artform. It turns out that hair craft also has a history in Iceland. Sigridur Salvarsdottir learned the skill of haircraft from her mother. If you happen to be in Rekjavik before March 13th, you can see her work on exhibit at the Gerduberg Cultural Centre.

A little something to remember you by

While 19th century British colonials were doing everything within their power to obliterate Aboriginal culture in Australia, Victorians throughout the Empire were engaging in some surprising hair crafts of their own.



Victorians tirelessly sought ways to keep non-working women occupied, and among them was this remarkable activity. Ladies braided, wove, looped and tied the hair of family members and loved ones into elaborate jewelry, keepsakes and tableaux. Large pieces might incorporate the locks of multiple generations into a kind of combination family tree and memento mori.

Here's a link to Missouri cosmetologist's site about her impressive collection of antique hair wreaths.

Here's an annotated genealogical wreath from the collection of the Millicent Library in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.

You may be surprised to learn that while endangered, this art is not extinct. The Victorian Hair Artists' Guild carries on the craft.

A few yarns from down under

[A formatting note: from now on, all posted images will be linked to their sources. Clicking on an image will open its page of origin in a new window.]

NPR's Soundprint has an archived Australian Broadcasting Corporation "documentary" called Knitting With Doghair. Woven through the piece is an outlandish tale of a Catalonian Jewish dogfarmer who made a fortune from the fine canine fiber she produced. Among its many high points is a revisionist etymology of the Yiddish word shmata. A little later, an expert appeals to would-be doghair knitters to select projects that reflect the spirit of the breed from which the yarn was spun, "don't use a whippet's hair to knit a footstool cover!"

Soundprint episode (requires RealPlayer)



Apparently I was a little quick to judge human hair's usefulness in spinning. Aborigines in central and northern Australia have a tradition of spinning hair - sometimes in combination with other fibres, including down and feathers - into string called Wirriji, which has both practical and ceremonial uses.



The painting above relates to a story in which an ill-fated lover sings a love song while he spins some Wirriji. According to Aboriginal Art Online, in central Australian Aboriginal artwork, "a sinuous line can mean a snake, running water, lightning, a hair-string girdle, native bee honey storage, or a bark rope."

Well. We're back to where we began.

Humanity and its dog

A DNA cable scarf is the perfect gift for anyone who's had their genome mapped. Or anyone whose pet's genome has been mapped.

What more suitable commemorative object could there be than a double helix knitted with yarn spun from the lustrous, gene-laden hair of the very organism whose chromosomes have been unravelled?

You need only send the fibre here.

In 2003, genetic researcher J Craig Venter moved on from decoding his own genome to mapping that of his dog, a standard poodle named Shadow. Shadow's hair would probably be better suited to spinning, but I'm sure that someone at the J Craig Venter Institute's laboratories could address that inequity with a bit of mitochondrial cut-and-paste.

When the US government went looking for a dog to map, they chose a boxer named Tasha. Like Venter, boxers do not have hair that is well-suited to spinning.




Researchers at the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory at the University of California at Davis are using Tasha's genome as the basis for a universal library of canine DNA. They are soliciting oral swabs from each of the world's 500 distinct dog populations.

Prospective donors can apply here

Humans have spent thousands of years making Canis familiaris the most diverse species on earth. Nowhere is this diversity more gloriously displayed than at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, which took place earlier this week in New York.

Spirals beget spirals

Today boingboing posted a link to BBC story about a newly published online archive of the papers of pioneering biochemist Francis Crick. Crick and his partner James Watson developed the double-helix model of the DNA molecule. Among Crick's papers is this 1953 sketch, which bears a passing resemblance to the drawings of Robert Smithson:



Link to Crick papers

Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their work concerning DNA and its role in cellular reproduction.

There's a nerve-wracking game on the Nobel website that teaches you a thing or two about DNA. There's another, much more sedate game relating to the subject of chirality, a geometric property of spirals and helices.

DNA game
Chirality game

While it's unlikely to net her a Nobel prize, molecular biologist and knitter June Oshiro's DNA scarf pattern is a very nice illustration of chirality.

DNA cable scarf pattern

Of moss and men who fell to earth

There's something affecting about the story of the Ohio State University biology department's moss experiments that were salvaged from the wreckage of the Columbia Space Shuttle. Some of the moss samples were useable, despite having plummeted 64 kilometers to earth.

In the absence of light and gravity, it seems that common roof moss (Ceratodon purpureus) grows in a clockwise spiral pattern never observed in other space-grown plants.

Link to the Nature story.

This beautiful spiral and its backdrop of untimely death reminded me of Robert Smithson.

Smithson rose to prominence as a minimalist sculptor in the late 1960s but eventually became best known for his astonishing earthworks – large scale sculptural reconfigurations of the landscape. Spirals were a recurring form in Smithsons work; he favoured a counter-clockwise direction for his.

The website maintained by his estate includes an excerpt from Smithson's film documenting the creation of the his best-known work, the Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah. The sequence was shot from a helicopter as it traced the path of the jetty from overhead. Smithson is heard reciting the coordinates and composition of the sculpture as we are drawn closer the spiral's centre. The artist's pride in his accomplishment is evident, but the film is also strangely prescient: three years later, Smithson was killed when his plane crashed while he was surveying the site of his Amarillo Ramp

Click on the film's title on this page to see the excerpt.