Smoking Cap

A Cap With One Stated Purpose

Smoking caps are caps worn while smoking, to stop the hair from smelling of cigarette smoke. That single sentence is the complete definition, and it is worth taking seriously rather than treating the cap as a vague piece of period costume. The cap existed to solve one specific problem created by smoking indoors: smoke rises around the smoker, and hair exposed to it takes on the smell of cigarette smoke. A cap worn during smoking covers the hair for exactly the period when the smoke is present, so the smell does not settle in the hair itself. The logic is the same as any protective covering worn for a single task and taken off afterwards: protection is needed only while the activity lasts, and the cap's use begins and ends with the smoking it was worn for.

Understood that way, the smoking cap belongs to the organised dress that once surrounded smoking at home, where particular garments were kept and worn for the activity. Its companion item in that dress is the smoking jacket, and the pairing makes the purpose clearer: items worn while smoking protected the wearer's ordinary clothes and hair from the smell of smoke, and were changed out of when the smoking was done. The cap's part in that arrangement was the head. Clothing and hair are the two things smoke clings to most noticeably on a person, and the cap dealt with the hair just as dedicated smoking dress dealt with the clothes. That is why the cap is a cap and not some other covering: a cap fits the head closely, covers the hair completely, and can be put on and taken off in a moment, which is all the task required of it.

A Factual Note on Smoking and Health

Any honest account of a smoking accessory should also state plainly what is known about smoking itself: cigarette smoking carries serious health hazards. The wording of official warnings changed over the years, and the sequence shows the warnings becoming more specific. From 1966 to 1970 the caution read: Caution: Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health. From 1970 to 1985 the warning read: Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health. From 1985, Surgeon General's warnings included that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and may complicate pregnancy, that quitting smoking now greatly reduces serious risks to health, that smoking by pregnant women may result in fetal injury, premature birth, and low birth weight, and that cigarette smoke contains carbon monoxide. Readers should check with the Surgeon General for the most current details and dates.

Those warnings put the smoking cap in its proper proportion. The cap addressed a minor, cosmetic consequence of smoking, the smell left in the hair, at a time when the far more serious consequences for health are the ones the warnings describe. Describing the cap accurately does not require presenting smoking itself as harmless period charm, and it does not require exaggerating the cap's importance either. It was a small, purpose-made article of dress, worn while smoking so that the hair would not smell of cigarette smoke, and remembered now mainly as part of the historical clothing that surrounded smoking at home. Its definition is unusually narrow for a hat, since most caps are defined by their shape or material, but the smoking cap is defined entirely by when it was worn and why: during smoking, and for the hair's protection from smoke smell. That narrowness is itself the point of interest, because it shows how a whole small category of dress can grow up around a single habit, complete with its own cap, and then remain in the record as a definition long after the habit's own health record has been stated in official warnings.