Eugene and the British Trade

Suter or Sutter, and why I have picked one

Before anything else, the spelling. English-language trade sources give Eugene Suter. French records give Eugene Sutter. I have not found anything that settles it, so I have picked one and used it consistently: Suter, one T, throughout this page, with the variant noted here once. If you go looking in French sources you will need the other spelling to find him.

I would rather say that plainly than quietly choose and let the choice look like knowledge. An unsettled spelling is a small thing, but the habit of hiding one is not, and this is a corner of hair history where a great deal has been hidden that way.

What is not in doubt is the outline. He was a Swiss hairdresser who had established a fashionable ladies’ salon in London’s West End, and from about 1918 he ran a company, Eugene Ltd, out of the Edgware Road. He was not the inventor of the permanent wave — that is Nessler, in 1906 — and the distinction matters, because what Suter did was the thing that usually makes the money. He took a frightening, slow, expensive invention and made it a product a normal salon could sell.

What was actually wrong with the machines he replaced

Nessler’s machines, and the copies of them circulating by the 1910s, had three faults a working salon owner would name in order. They drew a frightening amount of electrical current. They were slow. And they frightened clients, which is a commercial fault rather than a technical one and was arguably the worst of the three.

Suter had a West End salon, so he was watching all three faults cost him money every week. In 1918 he introduced an improved permanent waving machine under his own name. It drew significantly less current, and it processed the hair faster, which spared the client hours of a discomfort described at the time in the language of alarm. The heaters still hung from overhead wires to take their weight off her head — that arrangement, the chandelier, survived the whole era — but they were sleeker and better insulated than what came before.

Two smaller innovations came with the system and both outlived the machine. A perforated sachet, which carried the reagent to the wind in a pre-dosed pad rather than being brushed on; and a two-way curler, which gave the stylist more control over the direction the wave took. The sachet in particular is the more consequential of the two, for reasons that have nothing to do with hair and everything to do with what gets thrown away at the end of a service — that argument is made on the machine perm era.

He did not make waving possible. He made it sellable, which took longer and paid better.

Isidoro Calvete, the heater, and the rival line

The engineering behind Eugene was Isidoro Calvete, and his contribution is the most technically interesting thing in this whole trade. He designed the tubular heaters that made the machine practical, and then, when the haircut changed, he designed the heater that made it survive: a flatter croquignole heater that clipped over a point winding like a bulldog clip.

That is worth pausing on. The croquignole wrap is a way of winding hair, not a way of heating it, and a wind that lies flat against the head cannot be served by a heater designed to slide over a rod standing out from it. Every machine in Britain would have been obsolete within about three years of the bob if somebody had not solved that. Calvete solved it with a clip.

He also ran a competing line of his own, Icall Ltd, which is the detail that tells you how this trade actually worked: the engineer supplying one brand was a rival manufacturer at the same time, in the same city. An Icall machine of 1934 carried fifteen tubular and six croquignole heaters — twenty-one in one set, for both winds — with Bakelite casings and a timer that could be set for hair type. A period waving machine of about 1930 by Icall survives in the Science Museum Group collection as object 1968-637, which is the easiest way for a British reader to see one of these things for themselves.

Read that machine as a document and it tells you the state of the trade in one object. Both winds catered for on the same pedestal, because a salon could not predict which walked in. A timer, because processing had become something you measured rather than something you judged by smell. And a casing in a modern material, because the client had to be able to look at it.

The magazine that invented brand-led education

Hairdressers’ Journal had circulated in Britain since 1882, so the trade press was not new. What was new is what Eugene Ltd did with it. From 1928 to 1947 the company published The Eugene Waver, addressed to hairdressers it called Eugene wavers, with Art Deco covers and genuine technical material inside on setting lotions and processing times. Nineteen bound volumes survive in the National Art Library at the V&A.

Read that as a business decision rather than a magazine and it becomes the most influential thing on this page. Suter was not selling machines to hairdressers who already knew how to wave hair. There weren’t enough of those to build a company on. He was creating the hairdresser who could — and attaching her to his brand, in his vocabulary, while he did it.

She was called a Eugene waver in his own magazine, which is a piece of identity engineering that modern brands pay agencies for. And the technical instruction was real: a genuine wave took two dozen sachets, the magazine told its readers, which is simultaneously a quality standard and a purchase order. That is not cynicism on my part. It is the structure of manufacturer education and it has never changed.

Independent teaching grew alongside it, and Calvete deserves credit for starting it. He engaged the chemist J. Bari-Woollss around 1930, on the stated grounds that progress until then had been purely empirical — a remarkable thing for a manufacturer to admit in writing. Bari-Woollss ran controlled experiments on heat, steam, alkalinity, tension and overlap, and published his Manual of the Permanent Waver in 1934. He also brought sulphite and bisulphite reagents into Icall’s waving chemistry before leaving in about 1934, which puts genuine British research on the right molecules in the right decade — see machineless perms for where that chemistry went next.

His single most useful sentence is quoted on the machine perm era and it is the one this library keeps returning to: a point winding is almost two-dimensional, like the spring of a watch, and a root winding is three-dimensional, like a helix. Ninety years old, written by a man being paid by a machine company, and still the clearest statement of why the wind decides the shape.

The trade that grew round it

Eugene and Icall were the best-documented British firms, but they were not alone, and the shape of the market around them explains why the whole thing was so vulnerable when it broke.

Nestle was in the British market too, the name under which Karl Nessler re-entered a country that had interned him and confiscated his assets in 1914 — a story on Nessler and Nestle. Gallia is credited with first wetting the hair with reagent before winding, which sounds trivial and is not: it changes when the chemistry starts relative to when the tension goes on, and that is a decision every stylist still makes. Wella, at that point a wigmaker, moved into waving equipment in the same period. In America, E. Frederics of New York was building machines by about 1928.

What they were all selling, in the end, was the same object: a large capital item whose usefulness depended on next season’s haircut, sold to small businesses with no credit. That worked for roughly fifteen years and then stopped working very quickly, first because self-heating pads removed the need for the machine and then because the cold wave removed the need for heat.

Every maker of waving hardware faced the same choice in that decade: move into chemistry or disappear. Some managed it, and the houses that did are covered on the European perm houses. What I will not do is tell you which of these particular firms became which modern company, because the corporate genealogies in circulation are asserted far more confidently than they are documented, and a brand that claims a century of heritage is making a claim about a name rather than about a business.

What this page will not tell you, and why

Three claims about Eugene circulate widely enough that you will meet them if you read anything else on this subject. None of them appears above, and I would rather set them out than have you assume I had not heard of them.

That is a lot of missing paper for a firm this important, and it is worth saying why. The hardware trade of the 1920s and 1930s left behind machines, magazines and museum accessions — objects, which survive — and comparatively few company records, which do not. So the objects are well documented and the corporate history is mostly repetition. When you read a confident sentence about who bought what from whom in this period, ask what it is standing on.

A machine in a museum case is evidence. A sentence repeated in four books is four repetitions.

What actually survives

You will not see one of these machines in a working salon. What survives is not hardware, and it is more pervasive than hardware would have been.

The last thing worth carrying away is the shape of the career rather than the technology. Suter did not invent the permanent wave and did not invent the wind that made it work on short hair. He built the machine that made the wind practical, the sachet that made it profitable and the magazine that made it teachable, and for twenty years that was worth more than either invention. It usually is. Which is also why, when a client asks who invented something, the honest answer is nearly always a longer list than she was expecting — see the cold wave, where the same pattern repeats with worse paperwork.

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