The word dandruff rings like one to name something colourful and fun, but indeed is an unpleasant scalp disorder which reportedly affects almost half of the population at post-puberty age, regardless of gender and ethnicity.
Even if that massive in impact and considered as a quite normal dead skin shedding, dandruff is a highly undesired condition which can seriously affect one’s self-esteem, not to forget that can cause physical discomfort in the form of excessive itching. Luckily for most, the peak season for the dandruff in the UK seems to be winter, when heavy clothing, hats and scarves can cover its traces or the scalp cells covering our shoulders could pass for snow flakes.
One thing is clear, our modern society does not tolerate dandruff and is on a constant fight against it with the help of all anti-dandruff products the cosmetic and pharma industries have and keep inventing.
Dandruff is definitely a funny sounding word, and many would wonder what its origin and etymology could be. Unfortunately, we would have to kind of disappoint the expectations, as very little is known on the word’s etymology and often it is labelled as one of unknown origin. The common belief suggests that -ruff originates from the Old Norse huff, hurf (scab) to enter the Middle English with the same meaning and with the spelling of roufe.
Dandruff – a modern disease?
What is known for certain is that dandruff is not a modern disease, as it has been intensively documented by the old Greeks and that the first time the word appeared in print in the English language was back in 1545, in the Thomas Raynald’s translation of the Eucharius Roesslin’s (a German physician and apothecary) The Birth of Mankind.
The book was a real success of its time and by the mid 16th century had been translated into all the main European languages. Here is what it said about dandruff: ”They that have black hair, have more store of dandraff than other.” It is not proven that dark hair is more prone to dandruff, but, of course, as darker the hair is as more visible the dandruff flakes are.
The next definition and known spelling of the word comes as dandriff from A dictionarie of the French and English tongues, 1611: “Dandriff; the skales that fall from the head, etc. in combing.”
The dandriff spelling ruled for the next centuries and is rarely in use even nowadays when the causes for dandruff are still as quite of an enigma as its etymology appears to be.
