Hair Wraps
A tight spiral of colored thread wound down a few strands of hair, made at a sleepover or bought at a beach-town stand. We couldn't find who started it, but by 1998 Klutz had published a whole how-to kit for it.
A hair wrap takes a few strands of hair and winds colored string around them in a tight spiral. Doing one on yourself was hard. The clearest record of the '90s craze is Hair Wraps, a spiral-bound Klutz book-and-kit by Anne Akers Johnson published in July 1998, whose first sentence is "Wrapping your own hair is a little tricky, so find a friend who will trade wraps with you." Today later remembered hair wraps as a "slumber-party pastime."
We couldn't find a documented origin for the trend, who first sold it or when it started, so this entry doesn't claim one. What's documented is how long it lasted. In 2015 Today reported on "hair tapestries," billed as the latest '90s trend to come back, which weave thread through a large chunk of hair instead of wrapping "a few strands in a circular motion." Beach towns still sell them. Beach Braids, a family shop that has been on North Carolina's Outer Banks since 2005, still offers "a colorful hemp or macrame hair wrap" at its studios in Corolla, Duck and Nags Head.
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