Un masque à l’œuf qui tourne mal

What does “pellicules” mean in French?

Une pellicule is a very thin layer or skin, from Latin pellicula, “little skin”. That one image feeds two completely different everyday meanings. In the plural, les pellicules are dandruff — the flakes coming off a scalp. In photography, la pellicule is the roll of film you load into a camera. Same word, and the shared idea is the thin sheet peeling away.

The sense keeps stretching: la pellicule of a grape is its skin, and une pellicule de glace is a thin film of ice on a puddle. For the hair problem the plural is what you actually hear — j’ai des pellicules — and the shampoo aisle labels the remedy antipelliculaire. The word was borrowed in the sixteenth century for fruit peel, long before either modern sense existed.