The Cold Wave

What the cold wave replaced

For thirty years a permanent wave was a piece of electrical engineering. Hair wound, heaters clamped on, heat forcing a new shape into the fibre while the client sat wired to an apparatus for most of a working day. The machine era and the self-heating pads that followed it are covered elsewhere. What matters here is the residue those systems left: heat, weight, burns, and a large capital purchase standing in the middle of the salon floor.

The cold wave removed all of it. An alkaline reducing lotion opens the disulphide bonds, a rod holds the hair somewhere else, and an oxidising neutraliser reforms those bonds in the new position. The mechanics and the pH figures belong on the alkaline perm. The historical point is narrower and it is decisive: that sequence needs no heat, and once it worked commercially the entire hardware industry had no reason to exist.

Inside roughly a decade the waving machines that had defined the salon since the 1900s were scrap metal. Who made it happen is genuinely disputed, and I am going to set the dispute out properly rather than repeat the version that has been copied from textbook to textbook for seventy years.

Arnold F. Willat, one T, of San Rafael, California

The account in most cosmetology textbooks is that in 1938 Arnold F. Willatt — two Ts — developed a permanent waving method using a lotion and no heat, and that the method used ammonium thioglycolate. Two things in that sentence do not survive contact with the primary record.

Three United States patents titled “Permanent waving of hair” were filed between 1937 and 1939 in the name of Arnold F. Willat, one T, whose address on those documents is San Rafael, California.

US 2,180,380 is explicitly a cold process: the specification describes working at room temperatures, below the limit of body tolerance. That part of the textbook account holds up perfectly. The chemistry does not.

Willat’s patents use alkaline sulphides and sulphites — principally ammonium sulphide and ammonium hydrosulphide. They do not use thioglycolate.

That correction matters more than it looks. The thioglycolate cold wave is the chemistry on my trolley this afternoon, and attaching it to 1938 attaches it to the wrong man, the wrong molecule and the wrong decade. It also obscures the fact that the room-temperature idea and the thioglycolate idea arrived separately, from different people, and were only later welded together in the retelling.

There is also a 1960 book, Physics of Hair as Related to Cosmetology, published under the Willat Company imprint, and a Los Angeles Times obituary of 13 March 1988 headed “Arnold F. Willat, 102; Cold Hair Wave Developer”. One T in both.

Nothing places him in Britain

This is the most interesting thing on the page and it is an absence, which is why nobody writes it down.

A great deal of secondary hair-history writing states that the cold wave was invented in London. I have looked for the source of that claim and there is not one. Not a patent, not a company record, not a press notice, not an address. The three American patents give San Rafael, California. The publishing imprint is American. The obituary is Californian. Nothing places any Willat, or any Willatt, in London, in Britain or in Europe at all. The London story appears in secondary writing with no source attached to it, and it has been reproduced ever since because it was there to reproduce.

The textbooks that name him, for their part, give the year and no country whatsoever. The country was added later by somebody else.

The thioglycolate patent, and how it was destroyed

The thioglycolate cold wave is a separate document with a separate name on it. US 2,577,710, “Permanent waving compositions and methods”, was applied for by Everett G. McDonough on 16 June 1941 and issued on 4 December 1951, claiming mercaptans as waving agents at pH 7.0 to 9.5. In substance, that is the cold wave as the trade still practises it.

The rights sat with Sales Affiliates, Inc., a New York company that also owned the Zotos trademark. And it did not end well. Sales Affiliates claimed the application covered every cold waving composition and method then on the market, and litigated hard enough that a federal court in 1952 remarked on its reputation in parts of the trade as a litigious organisation.

On 30 April 1954 the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York held the patent invalid: want of novelty, no patentable invention, and indefinite claims. The chemistry that runs the entire modern texture industry has been in the public domain, by court order, since the year before Everest was climbed.

There is a quiet epilogue worth having. Dr Ralph L. Evans founded a laboratory in Hoboken, New Jersey in 1938, moved it to Waterloo, New York in 1943 and renamed it Evans Chemetics in 1949. Through several changes of owner it still operates today under a German thiochemicals firm. Most of the perm brands of the 1940s are gone. The business that made the thioglycolate is not. Zotos carries the other half of that lineage.

What it did to the salon, the training and the client

The waving machine was the largest capital item most salons owned and a genuine barrier to entry: you could not open a waving business without one. The cold wave destroyed the asset and the barrier in a single stroke. Capacity stopped being limited by machines and started being limited by how many pairs of hands could wind rods, and costs moved from capital to consumables. That pulled perming down the income scale and turned it from an occasion into an ordinary purchase.

The skill changed with it, and this is the part that still governs my working day. Machine perming rewarded operating a device correctly. Cold waving rewards diagnosis and judgement — reading the hair, choosing a lotion strength, winding with even tension, and above all taking a test curl and knowing when to stop. Over-processing replaced burning as the thing that ruins a head of hair, and the timer replaced the machine as the object the stylist watches.

When the machine decided the outcome, the job was running it properly. When the chemical decides it, the job is knowing when to stop.

For the client the change was bigger than the result. No apparatus, no weight, no risk of a heater burn — but a strong ammonia smell and a long quiet sit. Speed was never the selling point. Contemporary descriptions put the early cold wave at six to eight hours at room temperature, which is no faster than the machine it replaced. It did not sell time. It sold the removal of fear.

Why “cold” was the selling word

Cold is a strange thing to advertise in a beauty service, and it worked entirely because of what it was the opposite of. Every anxiety attached to thirty years of perming was thermal or electrical: burns, singeing, the smell of hot hair, the weight, the wire. “Cold” answered all of it in one syllable, without making a safety claim anyone could test, and it was literally accurate.

The word stuck hard and it is still load-bearing in several markets. German salons say Kaltwelle. French ones say permanente à froid. Japanese salons still list the cold perm as a menu item distinct from the digital hot perm, which is a live and useful distinction rather than a historical one — see the Japanese perm and the digital hot perm for what actually separates them now.

The regulatory ceiling is a direct inheritance

The pH range in McDonough’s 1941 claims, 7.0 to 9.5, is close enough to the modern legal ceiling to be uncanny. Thioglycolic acid and its salts are restricted for hair waving and straightening under Annex III of the EU cosmetics regulation, retained in Great Britain: a maximum of 8 per cent in the ready-for-use product for general sale and 11 per cent for professional use, at a ready-for-use pH of 7 to 9.5. The labelling carries a mandatory sensitisation warning and an instruction to wear suitable gloves.

So the lotion on a Mayfair trolley this afternoon is the direct descendant of the 1941 formulation — the same reduce-and-oxidise sequence, at broadly the same pH, refined rather than replaced. Eighty years of cosmetic chemistry has made it gentler, more predictable and better buffered. It has not found anything better to do the job with. pH and perms sets out what those numbers mean on a real head.

The Leeds laboratory nobody credits

There is a British invention in this story. It is not the one the textbooks tell you about, it is not in London, and the man responsible was not a hairdresser.

J. B. Speakman was a textile chemist at the University of Leeds. On 10 December 1934 he filed in Great Britain — the application carried into US 2,201,929, issued 21 May 1940 — covering the permanent setting of keratin by reduction in alkaline solution at room temperature, followed by oxidation to reform the disulphide bonds, with worked examples for waving hair.

That is the cold wave in principle, filed from a British university laboratory before either American claim.

He used no thioglycolate. He was a wool scientist working on the setting of fibres, and he was not trying to invent a salon service, which is exactly why he is never named as an inventor of the perm. But the idea came out of Leeds first, and it was strong enough as prior art that it was cited against US 2,577,710 in the litigation that voided it twenty years later.

So the honest summary is this. The room-temperature principle is British, documented, and academic. The chemistry that carried it into every salon in the world is American, commercial, and was held invalid in court. And the man whose name is in every textbook worked in California with a different reducing agent altogether. If you want a lesson out of that, it is the one this library keeps arriving at from different directions: the person who gets credit for a technique is rarely the person who established it, and never automatically the person selling it to you.

What a client can book today out of all this is on the cold wave service, and what decides whether it is available to you at all is on can your hair take a perm.

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