---
title: "Why the Barber Pole Is Striped Red and White"
url: https://quietmenace.com/grooming/barber-pole-history/
author: Quiet Menace Editors
section: Grooming
published: 2026-10-08
updated: 2026-10-08
topics: Grooming Essentials, Menswear History
---

# Why the Barber Pole Is Striped Red and White

> Long before barbers sold fades, they opened veins. The spinning pole outside the shop is the last piece of evidence.

On New Year's Day 1950, in a basement in St. Paul, Minnesota, William Marvy finished the design for a new barber pole. He had been selling barber supplies since he was about 12, and he was convinced he could make a better pole than the ones he saw on his rounds. He opened his factory that year, and by 1967 it had made its 50,000th. The object he was improving was several centuries old, and it advertised a service no barber would offer you today.

## When barbers held the knife

For much of medieval and early modern Europe, the man who shaved you might also pull a tooth, lance an abscess, set a bone or bleed you. Physicians were university-trained and often regarded hands-on surgery as beneath them, and the church steadily pulled its clergy out of the work. The Council of Tours in 1163 barred clergy from performing surgery. The jobs drifted to barbers, who already had the blades, the basins and the steady hands. In Paris, the surgeons of the College of Saint-Côme drew a line between themselves, the surgeons of the long robe, and the barber-surgeons of the short robe.

Bloodletting was the bread and butter. The theory, inherited from ancient medicine, held that draining blood could rebalance the body and treat everything from fevers to headaches. It hung on for an astonishingly long time. George Washington was bled repeatedly in the hours before his death in December 1799.

## The pole, as it is usually told

The standard origin story goes like this. A patient being bled gripped a staff so the veins in his arm would stand out. A basin caught the blood, and in some versions another held the leeches. Afterward the washed linen bandages were hung on the staff outside the shop to dry, and the wind twisted them into a red-and-white spiral that doubled as advertising. The painted pole is the memory of that staff, and the ball on top stands in for the basin. Older poles, by some accounts, had a basin at both ends.

It is a good story and probably right in spirit. The details are another matter. Accounts disagree on surprisingly basic points, including what the colors once signaled. One widely repeated version says that after the London barbers and surgeons merged in 1540, a statute ordered barbers to use red-and-white poles and surgeons plain red ones. Another version has barbers flying blue and white. Neither tends to come with a citation you can check, so treat the specifics as folklore built around a factual core. The barber-surgeon was real. The exact rulebook for his sign is murky.
![A black leather and silver metal barber chair](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1621645582931-d1d3e6564943?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop)

*The chair stayed. The lancet and the basin did not. Photo by Joshua Lawrence on Unsplash*
## Henry VIII and the Barbers' Company

The London side of the story is properly documented, thanks largely to the Worshipful Company of Barbers. It is first mentioned in 1308, when the city's Court of Aldermen elected Richard le Barbour to keep order among his fellow barbers. In 1462 Edward IV granted the company its first royal charter, giving it power to regulate the practice of surgery in London.

The big moment came in 1540. Under Henry VIII, an Act of Parliament merged the barbers with the Fellowship of Surgeons to form the Company of Barbers and Surgeons, and set out which work belonged to whom. Thomas Vicary served as its first Master. Hans Holbein the Younger painted the presentation of the charter, and the picture still hangs in Barber-Surgeons' Hall. The new company was granted the bodies of four executed criminals a year for anatomy teaching, and dissections were held in its hall.

The arrangement lasted a little over two centuries. In 1745, at the surgeons' request, a bill passed that let them leave and form the Company of Surgeons, which became the Royal College of Surgeons in 1800. That split is usually treated as the point where barbering and surgery went their separate ways in England, and from there the pole reads as a pure trade sign.

The company's hall on Monkwell Square was destroyed by incendiary bombs in December 1940, and the current building opened in 1969. Today much of its work is charitable, and surgeons have been admitted to the company again since 1919 in memory of the old union, a strange and rather lovely afterlife for a barbers' guild. Its own [history page](https://barberscompany.org/history/) runs through the timeline in full.

## So where did the blue come from?

American poles usually carry a blue stripe, and nobody has settled why. The most common theory is patriotic, blue added so the pole matched the flag. The [Wikipedia entry on the barber's pole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barber%27s_pole) calls that possible, and labels the anatomical reading (red for arterial blood, blue for venous blood, white for the bandage) more fanciful. A third explanation, which Snopes traces to Robert Wallace's book *The World of Rembrandt*, describes a color code in 17th-century Amsterdam, where red meant bloodletting, white meant setting bones or pulling teeth, and blue meant a shave. None of the three is proven. The blue is not only American either. Canada, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines often use red, white and blue as well.

By the mid-20th century the pole had become a piece of American industrial design. In 1950 only a handful of American companies made poles. Marvy's arrived with a clear plastic cylinder, an aluminum housing and stainless steel fittings, and by the late 1960s his competitors had either closed or were buying from his factory. That is the pole most people picture, a slow spiral turning behind clear plastic, topped with a globe. As early as 1905, Wikipedia notes, observers were already describing barber poles as diminishing in the United States. They are still hanging on.

The ritual inside the shop has changed completely, from lancet to clippers, which our guide on [how to ask for a haircut](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/how-to-ask-for-a-haircut/) covers. The blade work survives in the [straight razor revival](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/straight-razor-shaving-revival/) and our [safety razor shaving guide](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/safety-razor-wet-shaving-guide/), and the grease that came after is in our [history of pomade](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/pomade-hair-styling-history/). For more, browse the [Quiet Menace grooming section](https://quietmenace.com/grooming/) and our [menswear history](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/) hub.

Next time you walk out with a fresh neckline, look at the pole by the door. The red stripe is the last trace of the one thing on the old menu no barber will sell you now.

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Filed under: [Grooming Essentials](https://quietmenace.com/topics/grooming-essentials/), [Menswear History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/)
Hero image: Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash (Unsplash License)