Rowlands Macassar Oil

I don’t suppose many people have antimacassars on their furniture any more; antimacassars were squares of fabric, sometimes embroidered, some times a border of some sort, which were placed over the back of an armchair or sofa to stop the hair dressing from men getting on the fabric of the furniture. There are plenty of hair products these days, putty and clay and oils and dressings, waxes and gels and fixes, and I daresay many of them make similar claims to Rowland’s Macassar Oil, ‘prevents baldness, eradicates scurf’ as well as keeping hair tidy and in place. The oil was advertised as ‘a vegetable production universally admired for improving the growth and beautifying human hair’. Not only that but it was famous for ‘ornamenting and embellishing’ hair. There was a note of warning though; ‘the proprietors cannot be responsible for the serious injury resulting from the use of base Imitations of injurious quality’… you’ve been warned!

If you wished to change the colour of your hair, maybe red or grey hair to black or brown, then the product for you was Rowland’s Essence of Tyre.

Apparently, ‘Macassar Oil’ was registered as a trademark  in 1888 by its producer, A. Rowland & Sons, of London, but the Macassar Oil might have been trademarked much earlier, by Alexander Rowland in 1793. Rowland’s of Hatton Garden were responsible for many other products such as Rowland’s Kalydor, to eradicate spots, pimples, redness and all ‘cutenious eruptions’; it was also good for rough skin, sallow complexions, nursing mothers and gentlemen who have tender skin after shaving. What a wondrous thing! Apparently ‘this admirable specific possesses balsamic properties of  surprising energy’!

Rowland’s also made Odonto or Pearl Dentifrice, which was a combination, so they said of oriental herbal medicament which formed and anti-scorbutic white powder… Not only did Odonto give you pearly white teeth, it prevented tooth and gum disease and ‘endowed the breath with fragrency at once delightful and salubrious’.

One other very useful product, so Mr Rowland would have us believe was Alsana extract, apparently a cure-all, especially for ‘violent tooth-ache, gum-boils, swelled face,’ was an excellent ‘stomachic, in case of flatulence, spasmodic affections etc.’.

I wonder which of the items we find in our bathroom cabinets and on our dressing tables these days will seem as extraordinary as Alexander Rowland’s products do to us today?