Perming, Setting, Straightening: What Mayfair Salons Actually Did to Hair, 1906–Today
Straightening is a big part of my work today, so I have a professional interest in how we got here — and the honest history is that for most of the last century, London salons made their money forcing hair. Forcing it curly, forcing it up, forcing it straight. The whole story plays out within about a mile of my chair, so let me walk you through it: what Mayfair and the West End actually offered, decade by decade, and what finally changed.
1906: the six-hour perm on Oxford Street
The permanent wave was born on the edge of Mayfair. In 1906, a German hairdresser named Karl Nessler demonstrated the first "permanent waving" machine at his salon on Oxford Street. Hair was coated in an alkaline paste, wound onto heavy brass rollers, and cooked by electrically heated units suspended from a chandelier-like contraption above the client's head. It took the better part of six hours, the rollers were scalding, and early clients suffered burns and ruined hair while Nessler perfected it — famously practising on his long-suffering wife.
But it worked. Curl that survived washing was a miracle in 1906, and the machine perm swept the world. Every "permanent wave machine" photograph you've ever seen — the woman wired to the ceiling like a science experiment — descends from that Oxford Street salon.
1938 onward: the cold wave and the set
Chemistry eventually replaced cooking. The "cold wave" — thioglycolate-based perming, no machine required — arrived in the late 1930s, and it's essentially the same chemistry perms use today: break the hair's internal bonds, reshape, rebuild.
Then came the golden age of the set. Through the forties and fifties, the weekly shampoo-and-set was a ritual for any woman who could afford it. Rollers, pin curls, hood dryers, back-combing, and lacquer — hair built upward like architecture and sprayed until it could survive weather. Raymond "Mr Teasy-Weasy" Bessone ran the most theatrical version of this in Mayfair, all champagne and flourish. The beehive and the bouffant were the summit of it. Beautiful in photographs; brutal in practice. Hair never moved, and it never rested either.
The sixties: straightening arrives — the hard way
Then fashion flipped. The sixties girl wanted sleek, flat, swinging hair — and salons had to deliver straightness with the tools of the time. There were three ways, all rough. Chemical straighteners, essentially perm chemistry run in reverse, often harsh and unforgiving. Wrapping and roller-setting, using the head itself as a giant roller to pull hair smooth. And at home, notoriously, girls literally pressed their hair on the ironing board under brown paper, with the same iron used on shirts. I've met women of that generation who still remember the smell.
This is worth sitting with: the demand for straight hair is nothing new. Only the methods changed. And every method of that era took a toll the client paid later.
The Sassoon correction
Into this walked Vidal Sassoon at 171 New Bond Street with a better answer: don't force the hair — cut it. His geometric cuts of 1963–64 made hair look sleek and deliberate because of shape, not chemistry. The five-point cut didn't need the set, and it didn't need the ironing board either. Within a few years the weekly set was dying, the hood dryers were going quiet, and the blow-dry — a quicker, softer finish — took over as the standard salon service.
The perm never disappeared, of course. It came roaring back in the seventies and eighties in curlier, bigger forms — even Sassoon's own art team leaned into round, dimensional shapes in that era. Fashion breathes in and out. But the principle had permanently changed: after Sassoon, force was a choice, not the baseline.
The seventies counter-culture: South Molton Street
One more Mayfair address completed the turn. From 1971, the Molton Brown salon at 58 South Molton Street built its whole reputation on the opposite of the machine age: natural styling, botanical treatments hand-mixed in the basement, and finger-drying instead of hot tools. I know that salon's philosophy intimately — I worked at Molton Brown, and I've written its story separately — but the point for this piece is simple: by the seventies, Mayfair itself was offering clients a full escape route from a century of forcing.
What I take from all this
I straighten hair for a living, and I love the work. But a century of history teaches one lesson very clearly: force always presents its bill. Nessler's clients paid it in burns. The set generation paid in hair that never moved. The ironing-board girls paid in breakage. So in my salon, straightening is done the way Mayfair learned to do everything — with skill first, chemistry chosen carefully for your hair, condition protected obsessively, and the cut doing as much of the work as possible. And it stays in the salon: if you've read my straightening series, you know I don't recommend heat styling at home at all. History is on my side about this.
If you want genuinely sleek hair without paying the historical price for it, come and talk to me. We'll do it the modern way — which, funnily enough, mostly means respecting lessons this square mile learned the hard way.
Book a straightening consultation at Zoltan Hair, Mayfair — https://zoltanhair.as.me/
About the Author
Zoltan is a London-based hair texture expert and salon owner with over twenty years of experience behind the chair.