Paris, July 2026

There are few objects whose shape has barely moved since the Neolithic. The comb is one of them. A row of teeth on a handle. The solution was right from the very start. What has varied, considerably, is what it was made of.

The form before the words

In China, the earliest combs date back six thousand years, to the late Neolithic. In Persia, highly worked examples have been unearthed at sites five thousand years old. In both cases, the object predates writing. It is there before we can name it.

The Chinese language would eventually introduce a distinction that most Western languages never thought to make: the shu, a wide-toothed comb, and the bi, a fine-toothed comb. Two tools, two gestures, two relationships to the hair. This lexical precision says something about an attention to the detail of detangling that other cultures left implicit.

What the material tells us

For millennia, the comb was carved from whatever was at hand, or under the knife. Bone, ox horn, whalebone, tortoiseshell, ivory. Animal materials, all of them. Materials that come from the living and that keep, in their grain, something of that origin.

Weaving combs made of whalebone were brought to light during excavations in Orkney and in Somerset. The object is not yet only about hair: it also works the fibre, it organises the thread. The comb is a tool for setting things in order, whether hair or fabric.

Wood arrives as another answer. Boxwood, cherry, the close-grained woods that can be polished to softness. The workshop in Changzhou, in Jiangsu province, has been making wooden combs since the 5th century. Not the last 5th century: the 5th century of our era. This manufactory, known as the Palace Comb Factory, still works today according to gestures passed down over fifteen centuries. Each comb is carved and polished there by hand. The time it takes is the measure of what it is worth.

Ivory and tortoiseshell, for their part, belong to another logic. That of rank. These materials do not speak of care: they speak of position. Worn in the aristocratic courts of Europe and Asia, these combs do not only dress the hair: they signal. They are visible, precisely because they are rare.

Ornament as language

The Spanish peineta is perhaps the most legible example of this symbolic function. This large decorative comb serves to hold the mantilla on the head. It is functional, yes. But above all it is a statement. An architecture worn on the skull. The shape of the comb becomes almost secondary there: what counts is the height, the material, the visibility.

At the opposite end of this theatre of distinction, the hot comb tells a story of an entirely different nature. Used in North America to straighten kinky hair, it is set within a precise colonial context. It is not a neutral tool. It is the instrument of an injunction: to make the hair conform to a norm that is not its own. To read the hot comb as a mere styling accessory would be to miss what it carries. It reveals a power relationship inscribed in the very gesture of care.

The molecule from elsewhere

In 1865, a French chemist, Paul Schützenberger, discovered that cellulose reacts with acetic anhydride. He had just prepared, without yet quite knowing it, what would become cellulose acetate. In 1903, the chemists Arthur Eichengrün and Theodore Becker developed the first soluble forms of the material. The material exists. It still has to be found what it is for.

It would be aviation first. During the First World War, acetate coated the wings of aeroplanes. It is a material of war. Then, gradually, it migrates. It becomes the base of photographic film in the 1950s: less flammable, less costly than the nitrate film it replaces. It becomes a textile fibre, a cigarette filter, an eyeglass frame. And a comb.

It is a bioplastic, derived from the cellulose of cotton or wood pulp. One of the very first synthetic fibres in industrial history, born in a laboratory, shaped by chemistry, but rooted in plant matter. The acetate comb is, in this sense, the paradoxical heir of a long tradition of organic materials. There is a continuity, even where you do not expect it.

When the teeth vibrate differently

The comb also has a musical life. The teeth, according to their length, their shape and the material they are made of, possess their own harmonic qualities. It is this property that lies at the origin of the music box, and further still, of the mbira: that instrument with plucked lamellae common in many musical traditions of sub-Saharan Africa. The kazoo works differently: blowing on a sheet placed against the teeth alters the harmonic spectrum of the voice. The comb is primary there, foundational.

The silent archive

There remains one last reading. Less poetic, colder. Forensic investigators use the comb to collect hairs and dandruff. What remains in the teeth makes it possible to identify a person, to draw up a toxicological profile. Hair is an archive. The comb is what gathers it.

It is perhaps the most exact metaphor for what this object has been doing for six thousand years: it passes through the hair and it brings something back from it. Material, memory, trace.

The form has not changed. It did not need to change. What it contains, on the other hand, never stops transforming.