The 1980s Perm

Why the decade needed a perm

Through the 1970s the dominant shape was long, straight, centre-parted hair, or soft brushed-back layers. Perms existed and were mostly used quietly, as a body wave adding support under a roller set rather than as overt curl.

Then the proportions changed. Clothing silhouettes exaggerated, shoulders widened, and hair had to expand to balance them. Softness was out and structured, standing volume was in — and a chemical perm was the only way to defy gravity at that scale for more than an evening. That is a mechanical statement rather than a fashion one. Nothing temporary holds that much lift through a working day.

The cultural machinery around it is well known and I will keep it light, because it is the part of this page with the least documentation behind it. MTV launched in 1981 and gave youth culture a continuous visual reference in a way nothing had before; prime-time soaps put heavily permed, heavily lacquered hair into millions of living rooms every week; and the rock acts of the decade normalised extreme chemical texture for men, which brought a new class of client into salons that had never seen them. I would not put a number on any of that, and neither should anybody else.

The men’s side is the genuinely underrated part. For most of the century a perm was a women’s service with a small male fringe. For about eight years it was neither, and that has only happened once more since — see the men’s cold wave for where that sits now.

Alkaline chemistry, and why it suited the decade so well

To get the volume the era wanted, stylists needed strong chemistry, and the alkaline thioglycolate cold wave was the undisputed workhorse of the 1980s salon.

An alkaline perm runs at a pH of about 9 to 9.5. That is high enough to swell the fibre and lift the cuticle substantially, which lets the reducing agent in quickly and reduces a large proportion of the disulphide bonds. What comes out the other side is a firm, crisp curl with considerable root lift — exactly what a large silhouette requires, and exactly the wrong tool for the soft, undone result most clients now ask for.

Acid waves using glyceryl monothioglycolate had reached American salons in 1973. They run far closer to neutral, swell the cuticle much less, and need external heat to process at all. They were intended for fine hair and for hair carrying single-process permanent colour, and they gave a softer, weaker curl. They were the gentle option and they were the right idea. The next section is about what they turned out to cost.

The pungent sulphur smell of processing thio lotion became the defining scent of shopping-centre salons worldwide, and it is the thing clients over fifty describe first when the subject comes up.

The allergy that ended a chemistry

Here is the part of the 1980s that is missing from every popular account, and it belongs on this page more than anywhere else in this library.

Glyceryl monothioglycolate is a potent occupational sensitiser. Clients rarely reacted to it. The people applying it, handling wet permed hair all day, five days a week, did — and the medical literature caught up with the trade almost exactly as the boom began. The first indexed paper identifying it as an occupational sensitiser in hairdressers appeared in Contact Dermatitis in November 1981.

The German data is the most striking part, because it shows the withdrawal working. Analysis by the German dermatology departments’ network, published in Dermatology in 2000, tested 1,336 hairdressers between 1992 and 1998: the proportion reacting positively to the compound fell from 45 per cent in 1992 to under 20 per cent in 1997 and 1998. Nearly half a profession, sensitised to one molecule, in one country.

A page about the decade the perm peaked that omits what it cost the people doing them is not a history. It is an advertisement.

Two working consequences survive. GMTG is difficult to rinse out completely and persists in the hair after the service, which is why it reached clients as well as operators — and why a stylist handling a client’s hair weeks later is still being exposed. And sensitisation is built by exposure, so a long, uneventful history with a chemical is how it develops rather than evidence against it. Perms and scalp health covers patch testing and what a clear test does and does not cover. It remains legal in the UK, it is still used, and it is handled with gloves that are chosen rather than assumed.

The two wraps the decade invented

The appetite for very long, very curly hair created a mechanical problem the existing technique could not solve. A standard croquignole wrap, winding horizontally from the ends back to the scalp on a single rod, works only up to a certain length. Beyond that the hair layers over itself too many times, lotion cannot reach the inner turns, and saturation goes uneven — which means part of the section is over-processed while part of it has barely moved.

1. The vertical spiral wrap. The rod is held vertically rather than horizontally and the hair is wound around it in a continuous spiral from scalp to ends. It gives a cascading corkscrew rather than a roller-set wave, and it puts every part of the section on the outside of the wind where lotion can reach it. See the spiral perm.
2. The piggyback wrap. For exceptionally long hair, the mid-lengths and roots of a section go on one rod and the remaining ends on a second. Two rods per section, even saturation, and a uniform pattern root to tip whatever the length. See the piggyback perm.

Both were popularised out of necessity and both are now standard textbook method. This is the decade’s real technical legacy, and it is a good deal more durable than the silhouette. Any client today with hair past the shoulder blades who wants a uniform curl is receiving 1980s geometry, executed with chemistry the 1980s did not have. How rods are actually chosen and placed is on base control and rod size versus shape.

The styling ecosystem arrived alongside them. This is when hair mousse was mass-commercialised: handfuls of firm-hold mousse or polymer gel on damp permed hair, head tipped upside down, dried with a diffuser attachment that dispersed the airflow so the curls did not blow apart into frizz. The diffuser went from niche salon accessory to household object in about five years, and every curly routine of the last decade rests on a tool popularised to manage 1980s perms.

The crash, and the twenty-year hangover

By the early 1990s the bubble had burst, and the reason is not mysterious. Years of overlapping alkaline perms onto hair that had already been permed, plus aggressive backcombing, plus daily alcohol-heavy aerosols, left a great many people with dry, frizzy hair that parted under low load. Then grunge made visibly chemically altered hair look instantly dated, and by the mid-1990s a smooth, blow-dried, layered look had taken over completely. The perm went from mandatory to punchline inside about three years.

The industry’s texture hangover lasted more than two decades, and it is worth being precise about what caused it, because clients still carry it.

People over fifty flinch at the word “perm” not because perms are inherently ruinous, but because they lived through the one decade in which the trade systematically permed hair that had already been permed.

Their memory of texture services was formed at the worst possible moment in the craft’s history, and they are right about what happened to them. A perm is re-done whole rather than retouched at the roots, typically every four to six months, and running fresh lotion over previously permed lengths produces a demarcation line — and demarcation lines part. That was the systemic error of the decade, and it was an error of scheduling rather than of chemistry.

The damage did do one useful thing. It pushed cosmetic chemistry towards better buffers, better conditioning agents and, eventually, towards the bond builders now used alongside a service — which act on free thiol groups and never rebuild true disulfide connections, a distinction the bond-protected perm sets out honestly. The 1990s taught the trade what its own service could do when it stopped counting.

What the decade left on a modern menu

More survives than the reputation suggests, and almost none of it is the look.

What came out the other side of the hangover is the modern perm, and the honest summary of the difference is that the decade was not the perm at its natural state. It was the perm at its most reckless, and judging the service by it is like judging cars by the era before seatbelts.

Questions