Hair coloring
practice of changing the hair color
Hair coloring, or hair dyeing, is the practice of changing the color of the hair on humans' heads. The main reasons for this are cosmetic: to cover gray or white hair, to alter hair to create a specific look, to change a color to suit preference or to restore the original hair color after it has been discolored by hairdressing processes or sun bleaching.
Hair coloring can be done professionally by a hairdresser or independently at home. Hair coloring is very popular, with 50 – 80% of women in the United States, Europe, and Japan having reported using hair dye. At-home coloring in the United States reached sales of $4.8 billion in 2024 and is expected to rise to $8.2 billion by 2033.
History
The dyeing of hair is an ancient art that involves treatment of the hair with various chemical compounds. Assyrian herbals dating back to 2177 BCE contain some of the oldest recipes for cosmetic preparations known, including hair dye. The ancient Egyptian Ebers Papyrus, c. 1550 BCE, has recipes for dyeing gray hair and eyebrows. Assyrian clay tablets dated to the 7th century BCE mention using the gall of a black ox, cypress oil, licorice, and honey to turn gray hair black. In ancient times, the dyes were frequently obtained from plants.
“Hair coloring” enters the record as practice of changing the hair color. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hair, coloring and practice can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3991639. The Library of Congress control number is sh85058309. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024, 2033 and 1550.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hair coloring” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.