The History of the Perm: From Marcel's Tongs to the Cold Wave

A perm, short for permanent wave, changes the shape of hair so that curls or waves last for months rather than hours. Today it is usually done with chemical lotions at room temperature. The road to that point ran through heated tongs, electric machines that looked like props from a science fiction film, a dash of cow urine and the persistence of a handful of hairdressers and inventors.

Why curls fall out

To understand the perm, start with the problem. Straight hair can be curled temporarily by wetting it, setting it and drying it, or by applying heat. Those methods rearrange weak bonds inside the hair. Wash the hair, or expose it to humidity, and the curl relaxes. To make a curl that lasts, you must rearrange the stronger bonds that give each strand its shape. That is what a permanent wave does ^[1].

Marcel Grateau's tongs

The first practical thermal method came from the French hairdresser Marcel Grateau in 1872. He devised a pair of specially made tongs in which one arm had a round cross-section and the other a concave one, so that they fitted together when closed ^[1][3]. The tongs were heated over a gas or alcohol flame, and stylists tested the temperature on newspaper: if the paper browned slightly, it was about right ^[1].

The resulting marcel wave was soft, regular and glamorous, and it remained fashionable for decades. But it was not permanent. It lasted until the next wash. The search for a truly lasting wave continued.

Karl Nessler's machine

The best-known pioneer of the permanent wave is the German hairdresser Karl Ludwig Nessler, born in 1872 in Todtnau in the Black Forest. He worked in Switzerland, Italy and France, called himself Charles Nessler and often spelled his surname Nestle ^[2]. According to his biography he had been thinking about a lasting wave since his youth, when he noticed that wool, unlike human hair, stays crimped.

Nessler's experiments were famously uncomfortable. On his future wife, Katharina Laible, he divided the hair into plaits, moistened it with a secret mixture, wound it around metal rods and heated the rods with electrically heated tongs. Early attempts blistered her scalp, and the curl only held successfully on the third attempt ^[2]. Accounts of his method describe an alkaline mixture, including sodium hydroxide in some versions and, strikingly, cow urine and water in others, applied to hair wound in spirals around rods connected to an electric heating device ^[1].

Nessler moved to London, where his perm found customers. Sources disagree slightly about the date of his first major demonstration. One account gives 8 October 1905, while his biography gives a demonstration for leading hairdressers on 8 October 1906 ^[1][2]. His electric permanent wave machine was patented in London in 1909 ^[2]. During the First World War he was interned in Britain as a German national and lost his assets. He escaped to New York in 1915, found many copies of his machine already in use, opened a salon on East 49th Street and expanded to several American cities. He even developed a home machine sold for fifteen dollars ^[1].

The short-hair problem

Nessler's spiral method worked well on long hair. Then fashion changed. In the 1920s many women in the Western world cut their hair into short bobs ^[1][5]. Short hair could not be wound in long spirals from root to tip. Hairdressers needed a different technique.

The answer was the croquignole method, in which hair is wound from the ends toward the scalp around rods. Inventors including Eugene Suter, a Swiss hairdresser working in London, and Isidoro Calvete developed heaters and methods suited to the new short styles ^[1]. Machines with dozens of heated clamps hanging on cords from a central stand became the typical salon perm apparatus of the late 1920s and 1930s. They were slow, hot and occasionally dangerous, but they could produce the deep waves that defined the period.

Marjorie Joyner's patent

One of the most important American contributors was Marjorie Joyner, born in 1896 in Monterey, Virginia. She trained in cosmetology in Chicago, graduating from beauty school in 1916, and became a leading figure in the business of Madam C. J. Walker, the pioneering African American beauty entrepreneur. By 1920 Joyner was overseeing around two hundred Walker beauty schools as national adviser ^[4].

Joyner looked for a more practical way to curl or straighten hair. Inspired, according to her own story, by a pot roast cooking with paper pins, she experimented with rods and designed an apparatus that could wrap and heat many sections of hair at once, producing styles that lasted several days. After complaints about discomfort, she added a scalp protector ^[4]. Her patent, US patent 1,693,515, granted on November 27, 1928, according to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which holds tools from her Chicago salon ^[6], is often described as making her the first African American woman to receive a patent, although that claim is disputed, since Sarah E. Goode received a patent earlier ^[4]. It is also sometimes wrongly claimed that Joyner invented the permanent wave itself. Her design was an alternative version of a machine whose basic principle was established by Nessler and others ^[4]. None of that diminishes her achievement. Joyner also helped write the first cosmetology laws in Illinois and was a major figure in Chicago civic life ^[4].

The cold wave

The great change of the mid-twentieth century was the move away from heat. Chemists developed lotions that could break and reform the strong bonds in hair at room temperature, without machines. In this cold wave process, hair is wound on rods, a waving lotion breaks bonds within the hair so that it takes the shape of the rod, and a neutralising solution then reforms the bonds in their new position ^[1].

The cold wave made perms safer, cheaper and much more comfortable. It also made home perming possible. Home perm kits became hugely popular in the United States after the Second World War, letting women curl their hair at the kitchen table rather than spending hours connected to a salon machine.

Perms in the late twentieth century

Perms surged again in the 1970s and 1980s, when big, curly hair was fashionable for both women and men. Tight spiral perms, body waves for volume and the famous permed looks of 1980s pop and sport made the treatment part of mainstream culture. The chemistry continued to evolve, with acid and alkaline formulas designed for different hair types.

The same chemistry, run in reverse, underlies chemical straightening and relaxing. Instead of winding hair around rods, the hair is kept straight while the bonds are rearranged ^[1].

Perms and hair health

Because a perm rearranges the strong internal bonds of the hair shaft, it inevitably stresses the hair. Overprocessing, repeated perming of the same lengths, or combining perms with heavy bleaching can leave hair weak and prone to breakage. Professional stylists usually test hair condition first and avoid processing already damaged lengths. A perm does not affect the follicle or how hair grows from the scalp, but irritation of the scalp from strong chemicals is possible. Educational resources on hair structure and scalp health are available from the trichology community at https://trichology.com.

The perm in one paragraph

Marcel Grateau made curls beautiful with heated tongs in 1872. Karl Nessler made them last with electric machines in the first decade of the twentieth century. Croquignole inventors adapted the perm for the short hair of the 1920s, and Marjorie Joyner's patented machine showed how much innovation came from inside the beauty industry, including from Black women entrepreneurs. Finally, the chemical cold wave took the perm out of the machine and into the home.