Have you ever seen a traditional barber’s shop? It’s a place where men go for haircuts, and will often have a red and white stripy pole outside.

All very innocent, you might think…

(Cue evil cackles of laughter…)

The word ‘barber’ comes from a French word meaning ‘beard’. So far, so good. Except that once upon a time, a barber didn’t just cut hair: he was also a surgeon, who would pull out teeth and stitch up wounds. Worst of all, he would also perform ‘blood-letting’: a very old practice that involved slicing open a vein with a knife and letting it bleed. Why, you ask? (Are you feeling queasy yet?) The answer is that it was believed in those days that too much blood was bad for the body.

The red of a barber’s pole is a symbol of the blood that used to stain the floor of the barbers’ shops, and the white represents the bandages used to dress the wounds. Boys, you may want to think twice about your choice of hairdresser next time!

Did you know …

You might think that the barbers were ‘barbaric’, a word that means cruel and violent. In fact that word isn’t related — for ancient Greeks it meant ‘foreign’, because their vicious enemies came from abroad. And that’s also why they called a red, long, and strange-looking fruit ‘rhubarb’, because it looked so ‘foreign’ and exotic.