Margaret Vinci Heldt

Margaret Vinci Heldt (February 11, 1918 – June 10, 2016) was an American hairstylist, best known as the creator of the beehive hairstyle.

She was born Margaret Vinci in 1918 and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. When she was training at Columbia College of Hairdressing, she had to make her own practice hair by attaching her mother's hair, after a quick haircut, to a dummy. She married and became Margaret Heldt in the 1940s."Margaret Vinci Coiffures" opened in 1950 and Heldt won the National Coiffure Championship four years later.

The editor of the magazine Modern Beauty Shop in February 1960 encouraged Heldt, who was already a hairstyling champion and owned an upscale salon, to come up with "something really different" for the new decade, and she devised what became known as the beehive hairstyle based on a small black hat. The first example was on a model who was wearing a small bee decoration in her hair and Heldt says this is how it came to be known as a beehive. She said that the ideal ratio of hair to face was two to one. She objected to later adaptions of her design by women like Amy Winehouse.

Heldt died in a retirement home in Chicago.