Why People Burned Cut Hair: Folk Beliefs and an Itchy Beard

Why did people burn their hair after a haircut?

People burned cut hair because they believed it stayed connected to its owner: whoever got hold of the clippings could harm the man they came from, and destroyed clippings could harm nobody. James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, calls the belief that a person can be bewitched through the clippings of his hair or the parings of his nails almost world-wide and files it under contagious magic, where things once in contact are thought to stay in contact. His examples vary. In the Upper Vosges people burned hair and nail clippings rather than leave them lying about, Italian women burned loose hairs or threw them where nobody would think to look, and in the Tyrol some burned their hair so that witches could not use it to raise storms while others buried it. A second fear sat beside the first: if a bird carried a hair into its nest, the head it came from would ache. In Swabia clippings were to be hidden where neither sun nor moon could reach them, and in Drumconrath, Ireland, some old women pushed their hair into the cottage thatch so that every hair could be accounted for on Judgement Day. The shorn locks of a Maori chief were placed in a nearby burial ground, and Tahitians buried hair cuttings at their temples. Frazer himself spots the flaw in the reasoning. Destroying hair only makes sense while the link still holds, and if the link holds, burning the hair ought to hurt its owner.

Wind, birds and rivers: what Ukrainian ethnographers wrote

Ukrainian ethnography recorded the same fears with local detail. Halyna Bondarenko of the Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Ethnology writes that fallen hair was not thrown out into the street, so that the wind would not scatter it and give the owner a headache. She adds that people did not lend their combs, for fear of being bewitched, and that hair often served as a means of magical influence. The Ukrainian Wikipedia article on hair in mythology draws on Yastrebov, Sumtsov, Frazer and the Ukrainian Small Encyclopedia, and it says cut hair was advised to be burned or thrown into a river, and that a bird carrying it to its nest meant a headache for the owner. The Hutsuls told a similar story about mice. In the Zvenyhorod area cut hair was sent down the river, and sometimes baked into a loaf that a child broke and cast into the water. Hair also marked the stages of a life: a child's first hair came off at about a year, which brought the child into the family and the community, and a boy was cut "for his sex" and set on a horse. Before a wedding the bride's hair was unbraided, and afterwards the power of her hair was thought to belong to her husband's kin; in the Carpathians and Volhynian Polissia her braid was cut off after the wedding. A haircut was a rite, then, and the clippings belonged to it. All of this was recorded as belief, and it reads best that way.

Itchy beard: check the skin before you read the sign

Now the beard. The sign about an itchy beard lives in popular lists of omens, and the ethnographic accounts of Ukrainian hair beliefs that we read do not record one, so there is no old rule to quote. Popular lists usually name no collector and no village. The itch itself has ordinary causes. The American Academy of Dermatology says that without moisturiser the skin beneath a beard can become dry, flaky and itchy, while well-hydrated skin tends to itch less, and our article "Why Your Beard Itches or Hurts and What to Do About It" goes through the other causes and when to see a doctor. From the chair, the old fear about cut hair has a plain modern twin: short clippings stick to a damp neck and work under the collar, which is why barbers brush the neck before the client stands up. Another haircut belief, that cutting makes hair grow faster, gets its own answer in "Does Hair Grow Faster After a Haircut? Myths a Barber Hears in the Chair". Whether you burn them, bury them or sweep them away is a matter of family habit, since nothing above shows cut hair to be dangerous. At 044 Barbershop in Kyiv a beard trim is modelling plus a dry or hot-towel shave, so the outline gets a clean edge. If the beard has grown ragged enough to distract you, come in for a beard trim, and the barber can even out the cheek line and the neckline while you sit still.