The European Perm Houses

Where the bottles come from

Through the long stretch when a perm was close to unsellable in a Western salon, four European companies kept manufacturing, kept stock on wholesalers’ shelves and kept perming in the apprenticeship syllabus. The service came back; there was something to come back to only because they did not delete it.

Wella

Wella dates itself to 1880, when Franz Stroher began making hair tulle at Rothenkirchen. The name was trademarked in 1924, taken from the German for waves, and waving agents joined the range in the same period. A company literally named after the thing.

Its ownership is the most tangled of the four and the detail most likely to be out of date wherever you read it. Procter and Gamble acquired Wella in 2003; it passed to Coty with the professional beauty business in 2016; in 2020 the Wella Company was carved out as a standalone business with the private equity house KKR taking control. Coty sold down in stages and announced the sale of its remaining stake to KKR-managed vehicles in December 2025, with completion reported in early January 2026. KKR is plainly the controlling owner. I stop short of saying it owns the whole of it, because a small third-party holding reported in 2023 is unaccounted for in anything I can read.

Schwarzkopf

Schwarzkopf traces to the chemist Hans Schwarzkopf, born in Danzig in 1874 and died in Berlin in 1921, and to the powder shampoo he launched in 1903. Sources disagree on the founding date — 1898, when he is generally said to have opened his own shop, against 1903 — and I would rather say so than pick one.

Ownership here is the simplest of the four: Henkel, the Dusseldorf group, acquired Hans Schwarzkopf GmbH in 1995 and holds it still.

L’Oréal

L’Oréal was registered on 31 July 1909 by the French chemist Eugene Schueller as a company for harmless hair dyes. It was a colour house from the first day and it still is; perming has always sat beside the core business rather than in it, which shows in how little of the current professional shelf is given to it.

Alone of the four it has never been bought. It is a listed company, and the shareholding detail ages faster than any page — read it off the company’s own investor disclosure rather than off anybody’s article.

Goldwell

Goldwell is the purest of the four, and the only one that began as a perm company and nothing else. Hans Erich Dotter (1920–2012), newly back from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, worked out a cold permanent wave formula and founded the business at Darmstadt-Eberstadt in the autumn of 1948, backed by the local hairdressers’ guild. He made the wave himself and sold it direct to salons, and that direct-to-salon model stayed central as the company went international through the 1970s.

In 1989 Dotter sold to the Japanese group Kao, which still operates the Darmstadt site. Which leaves a European perm house under Japanese ownership — worth noticing, since Japan is one of the few markets where perming never went out of fashion at all.

The 0 to 3 scale is one house’s numbering, and 3 is the weakest

This is the most useful section on the page and the point most often got backwards, in salons as well as by clients.

There is no industry-standard perm lotion strength scale. The 0 to 3 numbering that British salons treat as universal is L’Oréal Professionnel’s Dulcia Advanced product numbering. It has become loosely familiar here for a dull reason — Dulcia has been on UK wholesalers’ shelves for decades — and not because anybody standardised anything.

Read the direction of travel. The number rises as the hair becomes more fragile, so a 3 is the weakest lotion in the range, not the strongest.

Get that the wrong way round and the error is not academic: you have chosen the most aggressive product in the box for the most vulnerable head in the salon, on hair that is already going to process faster than virgin hair does. Damage makes hair dangerously easy to process, not hard.

And the other three houses do not use numbers at all

Two of those systems even disagree about the cap. L’Oréal’s directions have Dulcia Advanced processing under a cap at room temperature; Wella’s tell you explicitly not to cover Perform+ with one. Same category of product, opposite instruction. There is no house rule that survives contact with both.

Which leaves exactly one sound rule: read the active ingredient and the pH, never the range name.

A tier is a manufacturer’s internal ordering of its own products. The reducing agent and the pH tell you what is about to happen inside the fibre, and they are comparable across every brand in the world. That is why this library indexes its chemistry pages by reducing agent rather than by house.

Chemically they are much closer than the packaging suggests

All four sell, at core, an alkaline cold wave built on ammonium thioglycolate at about pH 9 to 9.5, fixed with an oxidising neutraliser. What differs is the tiering, the conditioning each house adds, and the wholesaler you deal with.

The ceiling is shared, and it is legal rather than stylistic. Under the cosmetics regulation in force across the EU, thioglycolic acid and its salts are permitted in hair waving and straightening products at a maximum of 8 per cent for general use and 11 per cent for professional use, with the ready-for-use product between pH 7 and 9.5. Great Britain retains those figures word for word in assimilated law, so UK and EU salons currently buy to identical limits — though the two regimes are now free to drift apart, and one day may.

What genuinely differs between them, once the reducing agent and the pH are held constant, is the second half of the service and the conditioning attached to it. Each house sells its own matched neutraliser, and the tiers are paired to it: one of the four ships a stronger fixing product for its upper tiers, on the sound reasoning that hair which needed a milder reduction still needs a complete oxidation. Each also adds its own conditioning system — proteins, humectants, a named complex — and those are the parts of the story a representative will lead with, because they are the only parts that are proprietary. They are real, they affect how hair feels leaving the salon, and they do not change what happened to the disulphide bonds. Judge a system on the reduction and the fix; judge the conditioning separately, on how the hair feels a fortnight later.

That is why you will never see a figure above 9.5 on any page in this library. It is not a house preference and it is not caution. It is where the law stops, and anything advertised as stronger is either not a thioglycolate perm or is not telling you the truth about its pH. The full pH journey is on pH and perms.

The mild end of the ladder has quietly left

The sharper divergence between these houses is not what they sell. It is what none of them sells any more.

The true acid perm ran on glyceryl monothioglycolate — GMTG, and note it is glyceryl, not glycerol. It needed a hood dryer to process, it gave a genuinely soft result, and it is a documented occupational sensitiser among hairdressers. The first paper reporting sensitisation appeared in Contact Dermatitis in November 1981.

It was withdrawn from the German market around 1992. The detail that matters, and that gets reported wrongly:

That withdrawal was voluntary — a market withdrawal by the trade, not a ban by a regulator.

The distinction is worth holding. Nobody outlawed GMTG. The industry took it off the shelf in its largest professional market because the people handling it all day were reacting to it, and the retreat elsewhere followed commercially rather than legally. That is the trade regulating itself, and it is a better story than the one usually told.

What has replaced it at the mild end, mostly, is not from these four. Cysteamine — the thio-free reducer dating from around 1992 — and sulphite, the mildest chemistry of all, are now easier to source from specialists outside Europe than from any of the majors on this page. If you want the gentle end of the ladder, you shop outside these names. Those chemistries are on the thio-free cysteamine perm and the sulfite perm, and the modern niche brand built on cysteamine is Curl Cult.

Two things a salon should take from this

Ownership does not equal formulation. Wella has had four owners since 2003 and still sells a lettered alkaline wave. What ownership changes is distribution, education budget, and how long a slow-moving line survives a portfolio review. A shrinking perm shelf is exactly what that looks like from the salon side, and the shelf has shrunk: far less choice than the textbooks assume.

Depth of range on paper is not depth of result. A house with four tiers and a house with three letters are making the same decision — how much reduction this hair can take — with different labels on it. What actually decides the outcome is the diagnosis that picks the tier, and then the wind. Technique creates the shape; chemistry sets its strength. That is on base control and the European perm.

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