The famous curls of silent screen megastar Mary Pickford were real–at least, most of them. The big secret? She also had 18 false curls that she could add to her own when hers got limp or she needed more volume. They were made of real hair and she paid $50 a piece for them–about $200-300 in today’s money, depending on the year she purchased them.
Early in her career, Mary Pickford told her fans (honestly) that her hair was light brown, and that it had been blond as a child. But in the black and white films of the 1910s and 1920s, it photographed lighter and she was usually described as a blond. Often she was backlit, giving her a golden halo effect. At last she succumbed to her reputation and dyed her hair with peroxide to make it more blond.
Her fans were horrified when she finally bobbed her hair in 1928. It made front page news all over the country, and of course, a feature in Photoplay:
