French braid vs dutch braid free#

French braid vs dutch braid free#

In short, although you can feel free to keep calling it a french braid, the hairstyle is actually one of humanity's oldest and most popular hair inventions, just as much in use now as it was in ancient Sparta. Just like fries and a host of other things, our love affair with the French is writ large on our delicacies and refinements. Perhaps because France has always been so immediately connected to fashion and high living to people on this side of the Atlantic, any 'fancy' braid would have registered as Continental. It creates a more 3-D effect, with the braid displayed on top of the style. So why are Americans so confused? We can trace the origins of this particular misnomer back to an 1871 short story from Arthur's Home Magazine in which a rather misogynistic husband tells his wife to 'hurry up and put on that new cashmere I sent you, and do up your hair in that new French braid.' Now, a Dutch braid is actually very similar to a French braid hairstyle, with the minor tweak that you are crossing the side sections of hair underneath the middle strand each time as opposed to over it. How could something so universal be named after a single country? Wisely, the French themselves don't even claim the style as their own. 'Boxer braids.' 'Bobby-pin headbands.' 'Inside-out plaits.' Those are just a few of the phrases people have used to describe what are really cornrows, Doobie wraps, and Dutch braids.No big deal. It appears, really, that there are very few cultures unaware of french braids, making their unusual moniker even more puzzling. In the millenia following, the style also appeared in early Greek art, particularly iconic kouros statues, on Celtic warriors and lasses, and as part of the elaborate updos worn by courtly women of the Sung Dynasty. There, rock art depicting women wearing rowed braids dates back almost 6,000 years. People have been wearing the three-strand gathered plait for thousands of years, and the earliest evidence of the style comes to us from the Tassili n'Ajjer mountain range in Algeria. Instead, the place to start is North Africa. If we're looking for the origins of modern-day french braids, Eurasia isn't even the right continent. 'Boxer braids.' 'Bobby-pin headbands.' 'Inside-out plaits. So who's really responsible for the technique? The style's history is much cooler (and longer) than you might imagine.

As it turns out, 'french' braids aren't French at all. It's unclear what about them, really, is so Gallic. French braids are popular the world over, but they certainly aren't emblematic of France.