- [Coworker] Is it a wig?
- No.
(gentle instrumental music)
- Welcome to the Getty Villa.
Hi, Sheila, I'm Shelby.
Nice to meet you.
I'm an archeologist and I'm really happy
to introduce you to your hairstyle
and to this woman who's going to be you later today.
This is Venus, you are going to be
channeling the goddess today with your hairstyle.
- She has her own, like, platform here.
Like, she's, like, very extra.
- She is a really powerful goddess
and you have to be pretty careful as you go
out into the world wearing her hairstyle
because if a goddess actually unleashes
her full power in front of mortals,
they basically just burn up.
You are Caltilia, she probably has
a decent amount of money with her husband,
that's why she can afford a nice tomb altar,
but she is a freed slave so there's a certain
loss of status no matter what.
She's a Flavian, she is a high-status woman
from after the period of Nero.
She controls her hair, even if it's high and curly,
so that she's not being licentious or inappropriate
and it tells the world that she cares about her family
and that people should look at her with respect.
But like you, some of her hair's down.
Your hair's down too much for a responsible mortal woman.
She's a goddess so she can pull her hair up loosely,
tie it in a bow, have sexy curls hanging down long,
and all of that works.
She may look to you as though she's wearing
a full set of plastic curlers.
If you look closely, you can see it flips over once,
so she actually had really short hair.
To do it right, the hair stylist would have to
cut your hair all around your head really short,
which we will not do to you.
- I'm really curious as to how it's gonna
actually look on me.
- So you seem quite ready to go be Venus.
Okay, let's go meet Janet.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Hi, I'm Janet Stephens and I'm a professional hair dresser
and an experimental archeologist
in the recreation of ancient Roman hairstyles.
(upbeat instrumental music)
Now, this hairstyle involves knotting and some cord,
so I first have to section out the spaces
that are going to be involved in a particularly
interesting knot on the top of the head.
So I'm going to take out the front
and insert a hair bodkin to keep that out of the way.
So now I'm going to take a woolen cord
and I'm going to center it on the top of the head
and now I start wrapping strands around the cord
toward the back of the head.
Venus is the goddess of physical love
and her hair is often depicted as if it's
about to come down in anticipation of making love.
(gentle harp strumming)
And then we're going to tie the band again across that bun
and then we're gonna tuck those ends there.
And then these are just taken, tied in a knot,
and then tied in a literal bow.
Because hair is elastic and will tend to
try to spring out of any kind of knotted containment,
I'm just gonna take a couple of stitches
through the knot of the bow to secure it
and matching the color of the thread to the hair.
- Oh, I see you, bow.
It's so comfortable, honestly it felt like nothing happened.
I feel like I'm a goddess, I'm ready to go out in the world.
I think I can pull it off.
(gentle instrumental music)
The hair first has to be divided
front from back with an ear-to-ear parting,
and I'm using a tool that was used in antiquity
called a single-prong hair pin or I call it a hair bodkin.
Then once I get the hair divided,
I'll start braiding the back in order to get
that part of the hairstyle out of the way
so I can then concentrate on creating
the enormously tall fluffy bangs.
So what I'm doing is I'm taking
a large needle and some woolen thread,
tying a slipknot in the end,
so now I'm gonna put that needle through the braid
and through the slipknot and I'm gonna stitch that
to the base of the braids on the inside of your hairstyle.
(upbeat instrumental music)
- This is how I'm gonna get my husband.
(chuckling)
- I am taking very loose stitches
and shaping the hair so that it turns into
this very vertical shape that the style needs to have
and I'd like to make your facial curls,
the ones on your forehead just a little bit tighter.
I have a modern curling iron because, let's face it,
we don't want to burn down the building.
Okay, you are all done.
- This is very, like, airy on top
and this is very, like, like dense in the back.
If I didn't see, like, the hairs up here,
I probably wouldn't even have known
that my hair looked like this. (chuckling)
(gentle instrumental music)
- We're now going to do a style from
the Getty collection of a woman named Caltilia.
In order to make her hair spread across
the head the way we need it to do,
I've divided her hair front from back.
All of this hair is going to be styled in curls,
and this hair is first going to be done into a ponytail,
then divided into braids that are gonna be
placed around the back of her head.
So I'm going to take, first, a needle with some thread
and to make ponytails with needle and thread
is actually fairly easy.
You stab through the hair with the needle,
draw the thread through, put the needle through that loop,
and it automatically tenches around the hair.
I'm going to divide her hair into four sections
and I'm going to braid her hair all the way to the end.
So I'm going to use an acacia gum gel
to make her hair stiffer.
I'm going to sew two pairs of braids sideways
so that they create parallel rows,
and now I'm going to start just stitching back and forth
and just nicking the surface of the braids
so that they lay next to one another,
but don't collapse or get bunchy.
(upbeat instrumental music)
So what we have are three rows of curls
essentially layered over one another.
What I'm going to be doing is teasing the bases
of the curls so that I have a foundation to pin in to,
and then just roll that curl in.
(upbeat instrumental music)
- It feels very interesting.
- [Janet] Yeah, well, it is.
(laughing)
- I still think it kinda looks like curlers
and I also feel like I have, like,
a really delicate, like, art piece on my head.
I feel like I'm part of history
so I guess that was the goal, right?
So that's cool.
- I'm very excited, yet nervous to see
what people are gonna say about our hair in the office.
- Real interesting.
It reminds me of, like, right after you've taken,
like, rollers out of your hair,
before you, like, shake it out.
(laughing)
- [Shraya] What do you think?
(laughing)
- Why are you a circle?
Very intricate in the back.
It looks flammable.
- It's beautiful, honestly.
It's very elegant and, like, romantic and, like, Grecian.
I think the little ball on the front is kinda weird.
- It's not a ball, it's supposed to be like a bow.
- Oh, it's a bow.
- It's dope, honestly.
- You don't think it looks like a bird's nest?
- No, I don't think it looks like a bird's nest.
- Whose mom are you seriously, though?
Like, is there more to this 'cause all I see is the front.
Oh, it's fancy.
(laughing)
There's, like, little strings in it too.
That's really cute, actually.
This looks outdated.
- [Stevie] Yeah.
- It's ancient.
- [Stevie] Yeah, it's from ancient Rome.
- [Shraya] What do you think?
- Is that your real head?
- [Shraya] Yeah.
- I'm stunned.
- I love this.
At first I thought it was just like
you were getting a little volume in the front,
which I'm always about volume.
It's amazing how this hairstyle's, like,
thousands of years old and it still looks relevant.
- I can't put on headphones.
It's a problem that the ancient Greeks did not have.
- I really enjoyed getting to know a lot about Venus.
I felt like she is such a powerhouse.
I don't know if Venus would approve of the fly-aways.
- Overall, I thought this was a really awesome experience.
It was very educational, I learned a lot
about the hairstyles and the tools that were used.
I don't think this is a modern look by any means,
but it was a really, really cool experience.
- Cheers to Venus, cheers to making this hairstyle work.
(upbeat instrumental music)
- Hey, Unsolved is on a new channel and now your part.
- [In Unison] Subscribe here.
- That was my part.