Goddamn Angela dress that I have been drooling over…
Marilyn Monroe’s Hair
Before she became a major star in 1953, Marilyn’s hair went through just about every shade of blonde (9 in total), in 2 years and 9 movies: from ash blonde (1950), to golden blonde (1950), to silver blonde (1951), to amber blonde (1951), to smoky blonde (1951), to honey blonde (1951), to topaz blonde (1952), to unbleached dark blonde (1952), and then at last to platinum blonde (1952). Over the span of 10 years the colour of her hair did continue to fluctuate. With the help of at least a dozen studio hairstylists, she mostly used the services of Kenneth Battelle, Agnes Flanagan, Sydney Guilaroff, Peter Leonardi, George Masters and Gladys Rasmussen.
Rasmussen talked about Marilyn’s hair, “There are several problems with doing Marilyn’s hair. Her hair is very fine and therefore hard to manage. It get’s oily if it isn’t shampooed every day. And her hair is so curly naturally that to build a coiffure for her I have to first give her a straight permanent… The way we got her shade of platinum is with my own secret blend of sparkling silver bleach plus twenty volume peroxide and a secret formula of silver platinum to take the yellow out.”
Later on in Marilyn’s life, she would have her hair re-platinumed by a very old and ostensibly retired lady who came once a week from San Diego. This lady was Pearl Porterfield, who had worked for MGM where she had been responsible for Jean Harlow’s platinum locks. The two would chat away talking about Jean.
The damage to Marilyn’s hair from all those years of harsh treatments is evident in many of the last photographs taken of her in 1962. You can really see it in the 1962, unfinished film, Something’s Got to Give.
Hair Facts:
- Marilyn always wore her hair brushed toward the left.
- When Marilyn wanted to go out and about incognito, she resorted to a trusty black wig and large dark sunglasses.
- Marilyn had to work hard to life up to her desire, “to feel blonde all over” - and that included bleaching her pubic hair.
- According to Simone Signoret, Marilyn hated her widow’s peak as if it were her personal enemy; it didn’t take the platinum dye as well as the rest of her hair. To camouflage this, hairdressers brushed that lock of hair artfully over one eye.
- At it’s candy-floss whitest toward the end of her career - Marilyn referred to it as “pillowcase white” - she had to have her roots retouched every 5 days. The whiter and more artificial her hair colour; the more vulnerable and fragile she looked.
i love this.
