It can be no coincidence that tall hair was in fashion as the space race to land mankind on the moon quickened. In the 1960s everything was going up – rockets, hemlines and Norman Greenbaum, you name it, gaining height and getting high were very 1960s things. In these snapshots we see women with Beehives, the tall, conical woman’s hairstyle, also known as the B-52 due to a resemblance to the distinctive nose of the Boeing B-52 Strategic Bomber.
The Beehive was developed in 1960 by Margaret Vinci Heldt of Elmhurst, Illinois, owner of the Margaret Vinci Coiffures in downtown Chicago, who won the National Coiffure Championship in 1954, and who had been asked by the editors of Modern Beauty Salon magazine to design a new hairstyle that would reflect the coming decade. She finished the look with a bee-style hat pin. The magazine called it a “tall wraparound crown, creating a circular silhouette with high-rise accents” and named it the Beehive.
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