Macassar Oil Revisited

Common hair oil is nothing more than olive or salad oil colored red with alkanet root, and scented. It is far too thin to be useful, and it soils more than enough. Castor oil is a far better application. but in its natural state it is as much too adhesive as olive oil is too thin. Castor oil, however, has the curious property of combining with spirit of wine by which elegant addition we may make it as thin as we please. The celebrated Macassar oil is of this kind.
--Godey's, November 1855

I previously made some of this "common hair oil", using the receipt denoted "Macassar oil" in Mrs. Bradley's Housekeeper's Guide (1853). As noted in Godey's, this is basically just colored, scented oil:

"Any quantity of sweet oil, and alkanet enough to give it a splendid red color. Scent with oil of bergamotte, lavender or lemon." 

The first batch I made (already mentioned) was sweet almond oil, scented with bergamot and colored with alkanet. For Brigade, I prepared a larger (16 oz) batch using olive oil, alkanet, and a few drops of rose oil. It worked just as well as the previous version, and the rose scent paired nicely with the light red color.  It was observed that the light red-pink tint of the oil did not actually effect the color of any of hair (black, brown, blond, or gray) that it was used on.

I've come across a number of other olive oil receipts which call for different scents, such as rosemary or orignanum oil, sans coloring agent (orignanum is the genus of oregano and marjoram); a macassar oil receipt calls for both of the proceeding (and repeated here); another macassar oil has colored olive oil scented with cinnamon, cloves, and thyme; rose hair oil with otto of roses and rosemary oil. Several of these appear to have been copied from the 1847 Household Book of Practical Receipts.

Anyway, I finally decided to try one of 'celebrated' castor oil versions of Macassar oil for comparison. An Introduction to Practical Pharmacy (1856) calls for mixing 10 fluid ounces of castor oil with with 2 fl ounces of "very strong alcohol" and 2 fluid drachms of oil of jessamine.  Translated from apothecary notation*, that's 1:8:40 ratio of essential oil to alcohol to castor oil. The "spirits of wine" named in Godey can refer to ethanol itself (generally distilled out of wine, in this period), or to brandy.  Since the receipt I'm working from uses the expression "very strong alcohol", I decided to use vodka.

Macassar Oil

The thinned oil is a bit more viscous than the sweet oil version, but I noticed no difference in using it.


*Literally:
10 grains = 1 scruple (϶)
3 scruples = 1 drachm (ʒ)
8 drachms = 1 ounce (ʒ with an extra 7 on top)
12 ounces = 1 pound (lb, line crossing the l)

Incidentally, the scruple sign is a reverse lunate epsilon, the drachm is a lowercase ezh, and the other two I have yet to find on a windows character map.