Who Put the Blue in the Barber's Pole

Red, white, and blue stripes, spiraling on constant loop during the hours of operation, what does that signify? The barber shop is open for business (or not). But why are the strips red, white and blue?

            The symbol of the barber goes back hundreds of years to the barber-surgery days, when barbers did more than take a little off the top and sides. A thirteenth century edict issued by Pope Alexander III declared that clergy were no longer permitted to shed blood. Then who was to perform every day procedures such as bloodletting and tooth pulling if Father Charlie was no longer allowed to do it? Bob the Barber, that’s who.

            If someone’s blood was sluggish due to melancholia, pneumonia, or back pain, a phlebotomy was the remedy. To restore proper humoral balance, a patient would grab onto a white rod and squeeze with all of his might. That vein popping action would allow the barber-surgeon to take a transverse hack at the meaty sanguinary highway. When the prescribed amount of blood was drained into a metal bowl, the patient was bandaged up and sent on his merry (albeit light headed) way. After the procedure was finished, the barber-surgeon would wrap the blood soaked bandages around a poll outside of the shop (sunshine is a dynamite disinfectant, right?). Phlebotomies were largely abandoned in the late nineteenth century, most likely because there is no evidence of their effectiveness, unless a person is unlucky enough to have something like hemachromatosis, which most people do not have.

            Even though barbers no longer perform phlebotomies, the symbolic pole remains a sign denoting a place that a person may want to get a haircut. The white on the pole represents the rod that a patient squeezed during bloodletting, while the red represents the blood that was gracefully extracted (and the color of the once white bandages that were hung out to dry). The top of the pole represents a vessel for leeches, and the bottom cap represents the bowl that blood was drained into. Now the question comes, what does the blue stand for? If you were to survey barber shops around the United States, you would find that most barber poles are red, white, and blue. Where does the blue come in? The prevailing explanation is that the blue represents the blue vein that is severed during a phlebotomy. This makes sense, but why has the blue only largely remained on American barber poles? The most likely explanation is that with its partners red and white, blue completes the color scheme of the US flag. Oh American and its patriotism.