Margaret Vinci Heldt, a Chicago beautician who, with the aid of hair spray and a favorite hat, redefined coiffure for women of the 1960s and the decades beyond when she created the sky-scraping hairdo known as the beehive, died on Friday in Elmhurst, Ill. She was 98.

The cause was heart failure, said her daughter, Carlene Ziegler.

The beehive, in which the hair is back-combed for volume, piled on top of the head and neatly wrapped as if a package, sometimes with tendrils flowing down as well, was a style designed to give women height and suggest elegance, and to be a departure from the bouffant and the other more flattened styles of the 1950s.

Made possible, like the puffy, rounded bouffant, by the liberal application of a postwar beauty innovation — hair spray from an aerosol can — the beehive made its first appearance in February 1960 in the pages of the trade publication Modern Beauty Shop.

Its immediate popularity was fanned by the popular celebrities who adopted it — including the singers Dusty Springfield, Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand and the Ronettes, and the actresses Brigitte Bardot and Audrey Hepburn. Fans of “Mad Men,” the recent television series set in the advertising world of the 1960s, will recall the beehive as a distinct feature of office fashion.