Before the Perm

The wave that had to be done again every week

Before the twentieth century a wave came from one of two places. You grew it, or somebody put it in with their hands or a hot iron and it stayed until your next shampoo. Hair was washed rarely by our standards, so a good wave could carry a client from one appointment to the next, and a whole profession was built on that gap. But nobody had chosen the temporary wave. It was simply the edge of what could be done without chemistry.

Three techniques shared that edge. Marcel waving pressed a run of ridges into dry hair with heated tongs. Finger waving moulded the same shape into wet, lotioned hair with a comb and the fingers. Water waving — setting — wound wet hair onto something and dried it there. Different tools, different rooms, different prices, and one identical mechanism underneath.

Water and heat break the hydrogen bonds inside the fibre. The hair is moved somewhere else. As it dries and cools those bonds reform where the hair now sits, and hold it. Nothing structural has been altered. Put the hair back into water — a shampoo, rain, a humid evening, a hot kitchen — and the bonds break again and the hair goes back to being what it is.

Hydrogen bonds are what water and heat move, and that is temporary. Disulphide bonds are what chemistry moves, and that is permanent. Every page in this library sits on that one line.

I still spend part of most consultations drawing this distinction, because clients arrive having conflated the two. A wave produced by a wand and a wave produced by a rod and a lotion look similar in a photograph and are not remotely the same purchase. The page on curl memory and water takes the physics further than I will here.

Marcel Grateau, and a record that will not settle

The name attached to the first heated-iron waving technique to become a worldwide standard is Marcel Grateau, a French hairdresser who worked out of a modest Paris salon — Montmartre, in several accounts — on clients who could pay very little, while he refined the method.

When he invented it, the sources will not agree. The obituary carried by Time magazine’s Milestones column on 15 June 1936 states plainly that he invented the process in 1872, and several trade histories repeat that year. Other reference works give 1870, and some 1875. The position here is the honest one: the decade is certain, the year is not, and I would rather say so than choose the version that reads best.

The name is contested too, and this is the more interesting part, because the primary documents disagree with each other. That 1936 obituary calls him François Marcel Grateau. His American patents are filed under two different names again: the curling iron of 1905 under François Marcel Woelffle of New York, the waving iron of 1916 under simply François Marcel of Brooklyn. Which was the birth name and which the working one I cannot settle, so I do not.

What the patents were actually trying to fix

Two documents survive with his hand on them, and they are worth reading as engineering rather than as history. US 806,386, “Curling-Iron”, was filed on 2 March 1905 and granted on 5 December 1905. It opens by objecting that the irons then in use required the hair to be twisted after clamping, which, in the patent’s own words, “causes material damage to the hair”. US 1,277,739, “Hair-Waving Iron”, filed 18 December 1916 and granted 3 September 1918, was designed to be heated electrically rather than in a flame.

So the man who invented the technique spent the next thirty years trying to make it gentler and trying to get the naked flame out of the room. That is a recognisable career. It is also the first documented instance of the thing this trade does constantly: invent something that works, then spend a generation reducing what it costs the hair.

The irons had no thermostat, so the skill was knowing when to stop heating

The tool was a pair of heavy metal tongs: a solid rod and a hinged, hollowed jaw that closed around it. The hair was taken dry, in sections. The iron was closed on a section and turned, then released and moved along, each pass laying a ridge running opposite to the one before. What you got was a run of alternating S-shapes lying flat and parallel across the head, quite unlike a curl, with a comb working ahead of the iron to shield the scalp.

None of these irons had a temperature setting. They were heated in a gas burner, a spirit lamp or a purpose-built stove, and readiness was judged by hand and by eye. The standard check, still taught wherever stove-heated marcel irons appear on a syllabus, is to close the iron on a piece of tissue paper. If the paper browns or scorches, the iron is too hot to put on a person.

I find this the most useful thing the era left behind. Modern irons have thermostats and stylists still overheat hair, because the failure mode was never the equipment. Too little and nothing sets. Too much and the fibre is altered in a way no conditioner reverses. The marceller had to hold that judgement in her hand every time she picked the tool up, and there is an argument that having a dial has made us worse at it rather than better.

Finger waving, and the gums that held it

Finger waving produces very nearly the same shape with no heat at all. The British training text Mastering Hairdressing, by Leo Palladino, defines it as a method of moulding the hair into S-shaped movements with the hands, fingers and comb, records that it is also called water waving or setting, and states flatly that the result is temporary.

The method is wet hair, a setting lotion, a fine comb and two fingers. The comb draws the hair up into a ridge; the second finger pins that ridge while the comb moves the hair below it in the opposite direction; and so on down the head. Clips hold the ridges while the hair dries in position.

Quince seed and karaya

The lotions were plant gums, and they are worth naming because almost nobody in the trade can now say what was in the bottle. Bandoline, the older of the two, was made from quince seed steeped in water — the seeds throw a clear mucilage that dries to a firm, glassy film. Karaya gum, a tree exudate, came later and became the standard finger-waving lotion of the 1920s and 1930s.

Both did precisely what a modern setting lotion does. They hold hydrogen bonds in position while the hair dries, under a film that resists the moisture trying to undo the work. Swap the gum for a synthetic polymer and you have the mousse on my trolley. The chemistry improved; the job description did not move an inch. Anything in foam rollers and rag setting is this same principle with better equipment.

Finger waving became the salon staple of the 1920s and 1930s because it suited the bob, cost less than a marcel and needed no flame in the room. Josephine Baker is the figure most associated with the look, and lent her name to a hair fixative sold as Bakerfix.

A profession built on a single movement

For roughly fifty years, “marceller” was a job title. The technique could not be improvised. It needed a trained hand, a hot tool and a client sitting still, and it gave the trade something it had never had at scale: a service women came back for on a schedule, at a price, in dedicated premises. A great deal of what we now call salon culture — the repeat booking, the standing appointment, the relationship — was assembled around that one movement.

How badly the look was wanted, and how hard the professional version stayed, can be read off a rival patent. US 855,709, a “Marcel-Waving Iron” filed by August W. Kahle and Ludwig Rensman on 3 October 1906 and granted on 4 June 1907, was designed to let a woman marcel her own hair, in the document’s own words, “without any previous training in the art or any assistance”. That is the home-kit argument, made forty years before the boxed home perm, and it did not work then either.

The tools were core stock in the Black beauty industry as well. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture holds a marcel waving iron and a marcel comb among the implements sold through Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro College, founded in St Louis in 1902. Iron waving was never a single tradition, and the histories that treat it as a Parisian story are telling you about a third of it.

Why “permanent” became the most valuable word in the trade

It is hard now to feel the force of it. To a client in 1910, every wave she had ever paid for carried an expiry date set by the weather. A wave that survived a shampoo was not an improvement on the marcel. It was a different category of object.

That is what the first machine wave was actually selling, and it is why the marketing worked despite a service that took most of a day and carried a genuine risk of burning. The first permanent wave was not sold on beauty, speed, comfort or price, on none of which could it possibly have won. It was sold on one adjective. The trade has never given the word back.

The mechanism is what separated the two eras. Chemistry reached the disulphide bonds — the sulphur-to-sulphur cross-links that hold the hair in the shape it grew in — broke them, and let them reform in a new position. Heat and water only ever reached the hydrogen bonds. One washed out. One grew out.

How the era ended, and what refused to die

The marcel did not disappear the day the permanent wave arrived. The two ran side by side for decades, the perm supplying the underlying movement and a marcel or a finger wave dressing the surface — exactly the relationship a modern perm has with a modern blow-dry. What finished heated-iron waving as a mainstream service was everything that came after it: the machine perm heyday, the machineless pads of the 1930s, and finally the cold wave, which built curl into hair at room temperature. Once that was possible there was no reason left to keep a flame burning in a salon.

If you want the modern version of any of this on a menu, it is a cut and a set rather than a chemical service, and I would rather book you for that than talk you into something your hair will not thank me for. Where a wave does need to be built in rather than put on, the cold wave service is where that conversation goes.

Questions