A blue rinse is a dilute hair dye used to reduce the yellowed (or translucent, showing scalp colour) appearance of greying hair on older women. The ability to see blue decreases with age due to the development of cataracts, so an older woman perceives her uncolored hair to have a yellow-tinge, and the blue rinse brings the color back to a perceived normal color in their eyes. In a manner similar to laundry bluing, the blue rinse can make yellow-white hair appear blue-white, but an inexpertly applied blue rinse will leave a distinctly unnatural tinge behind.
The "blue rinse" may also stem from a popular trend in the 1930s, popularized by film star Jean Harlow, for young woman to dye their hair with peroxide and then follow with a rinse of methylene blue to take out the yellow, creating the desired platinum white effect.
The phrase entered popular culture as a term for elderly women, the blue rinse brigade. An alternative term is "blue hair." It has declined in popularity with the increasing popularity of home dyeing, the reduced prevalence of smoking (which yellows the hair), the increased ubiquity of cataract surgery, and with society's more relaxed attitude to ageing.
Notable characters from British television series with blue rinse include Phyllis Pearce from soap opera Coronation Street and Mrs. Slocombe in sitcom Are You Being Served?.
Famous quotes containing the word blue:
“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean,—roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin,—his control
Stops with the shore;”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)