“So, what is the beauty ritual that you cherished the most as a child?” It has been a decade of interviewing celebrities, It-girls and general glitterati for their most prized beauty secrets, and this question now slips out on autopilot—as routine as querying about the weather. In response, besan facials and turmeric tend to get a passing nod but, unsurprisingly, hair oiling pulls in the largest crowds. What follows are nostalgic raptures, a collective yearning for simpler times, and hey, would you like my family’s super-secret hair oil recipe to grow hair faster than ever before? Spoiler alert: the secret ingredient is almost always love—and a few dollops of castor oil.
Even while the minutiae differ, the responses tend to paint a uniform picture: grandmothers lovingly passing on their hair-oiling secrets as part of their legacy. Like a family heirloom being preciously passed down the line, mothers would then pin their errant teenage daughters down for weekly champi sessions. Generations may change but what doesn’t change is the fierce, unspoken love powering each motion as tangles are attacked with brute force and handfuls of grease are patted and massaged into the scalp at industrial speed. And while the chain of succession of beauty rituals traditionally runs from grandmothers to mothers and then daughters, my own introduction to the therapeutic powers of hair oiling came from an unexpected source: my father.
Providing for four kids translated into frequent late nights for him, but on weekends my mother would be nudged out of the driver’s seat. For the span of a leisurely Sunday morning, the outside world was placed on pause as he lined up all three of his daughters. A dollop of coconut oil would be coaxed from the bottle and melted between his palms. As he ran the heated warmth across our scalps in rhythmic motions, there was a poetic, unhurried idyll to each gesture—this was not just another task to be crossed off a frenzied to-do list. While he meditated over the coming week, we revelled in the feel of the oil saturating our strands with its soul-affirming warmth.
Like a photograph pressed haphazardly between the vinyl sheets of an album, the edges of our memories have greyed and faded with time. But the serenity of this hair-oiling ritual is a keepsake that me and my older sister have unflinchingly clung on to. “Raising two kids doesn’t leave you with much free time, but we refuse to compromise on our weekend hair-oiling routine,” she shares with me. Together, she and her children delight in crafting their own DIY concoctions in the pantry on the weekends. (“The secret is aloe vera gel and rosemary oil,” she tells me delightedly.) As her fingers expertly massage their way through their scalps, my mind wanders. A few decades from now, would her son perhaps carry on this same routine with his daughters?
My father’s history seems to lean in favour, with him having initially inherited his own hair-oiling habits from his mother. “Growing up in the 1960s didn’t leave a lot of options for haircare,” he reminisces. Even as Raj Kapoor’s floppy mop dominated the silver screen, there weren’t handy barber shops emblazoned with Zayn Malik’s faux hawk propped up on every street corner. Instead, he would cluster around a value-sized pack of coconut oil every morning with his five brothers. The ritual soon took hold, and when his work took him to South Africa two decades later, he reached for a tin of coconut hair oil to revive the comforts of home in a foreign land.
Now 70 years old, he still starts each morning with a rejuvenating head massage. As I watch him pause and peruse his options—will it be onion oil to prevent greying or coconut oil for detangling today?—the enormity of this seemingly mundane ritual hits me. Long before beauty had broken free from the gender binary, hair oiling was the one luxury that Indian men allowed themselves.
When I share my observations with Mehek Rohira, a Mumbai-based psychologist at The Mood Space, she remains unsurprised. “For the longest time, beauty was seen as something for women, while men were expected to just power through without needing a break. But the truth is that taking care of yourself with beauty rituals isn’t indulgent or unnecessary—it’s a basic human need,” she says.
Her words echo in my head as I stumble upon the internet’s newest obsession: hair slugging—a term that does little justice to the nuanced history that this centuries-old practice holds.
Small habits, such as hair oiling, have been giving men access to a world of beauty that has historically shut them out through the ages. Beyond just looking good, these rituals also afford the opportunity to breathe, reflect and reset. As Rohira explains, “Men are often taught to devote their energy to work, family and responsibilities, so they rarely carve out time for themselves. These little rituals are a way to do just that—to take a moment and say, ‘Hey, I matter too.’”
