Toni and the Home Perm Brands

Two brothers and a decision to go round the trade

The Toni Company was established in 1944 by the brothers Neison and Irving Harris, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Minneapolis appears in a great deal of the retelling, and it is the wrong city. The Smithsonian’s accession record for its Toni permanent wave kit gives the manufacturer as the Toni Company of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and the Harris family’s own account has Irving born and raised in Saint Paul. If you have read Minneapolis somewhere, that is where the error lives.

There is one further wrinkle worth being honest about. The news service of the Supreme Court of Ohio — which had cause to look, for reasons that arrive later on this page — states that the brothers established the company in 1944. The Harris family’s own investment firm describes Irving’s success as beginning with the purchase of the Toni Home Permanent Company. Founded or bought, the two accounts do not quite meet, and the safe published wording is that the business was established by the brothers in 1944.

What is not in dispute is the strategy. They had tried selling beauty products to salons and had not got far. The decision they took was to stop trying to reach the professional and go around him entirely.

Every company on this page exists because somebody worked out that the customer of a professional service can be sold the service’s inputs directly.

What was actually in the box, and why it could be

The product was a mild, heavily buffered version of the salon cold wave lotion, packed with a neutraliser, simple plastic curlers, end papers and a printed sheet of directions, and priced as a household purchase rather than an appointment.

None of that was possible before room-temperature waving. A machine perm needed a machine, a power supply and an operator; there was no box to be made of it. Once the chemistry worked cold, the entire technical content of a permanent wave could be put in a carton and shipped — and the only remaining question was how much of the risk went in the carton with it.

The answer the retail brands arrived at was heavy buffering and wide safety margins. Put waving lotion into untrained hands and the formulation has to survive being left on too long, mixed impatiently and applied unevenly by somebody working blind. That commercial constraint drove a great deal of gentle formulation work, and it fed back into what salons were later sold. A useful share of the mild end of a modern trolley traces to a retail problem rather than a laboratory ambition.

I am not printing the two price figures that circulate for this era — a salon wave and a kit — because neither could be traced to a period source. The gap was large enough to be the whole business, and that is as far as the evidence takes me.

Four years, twenty million dollars

On 2 January 1948 the Gillette Safety Razor Company bought the Toni Company for twenty million dollars. A detailed corporate chronology drawn from Gillette’s published company history records the date, the sum, and the fact that the deal was presented to the board by an outside attorney, Carl J. Gilbert, who would later run the company.

Four years from a standing start. It is worth sitting with that number, because it is the whole argument about what the boom was. A business founded in 1944 to sell women a cheaper way of doing something they were already paying for was worth twenty million dollars by the beginning of 1948, to a buyer with no position whatever in female beauty. Gillette was a men’s grooming company. It bought a permanent wave.

The sequence matters more than it looks. The famous twins advertising ran in print from 1948, which is after the sale, not before it — so the campaign that made Toni a household name was running under Gillette’s ownership and on Gillette’s money. It was not what the brothers sold. It was what the buyer did next.

The campaign itself, and the touring twins who made it a public event through 1948 and 1949, belong to the cultural half of this story and are on the home perm boom.

Procter and Gamble, and a packaging war that was really a technique war

Watching what Gillette was earning, Procter and Gamble entered with Lilt, at the end of the 1940s.

I am giving no launch year, because none can be sourced. The Smithsonian holds a Lilt kit, maker Procter and Gamble of Cincinnati, and the record carries no date. The years given in popular accounts could not be corroborated from any company or archival source. “At the end of the 1940s” is what the evidence supports and it is what this library will say until something better turns up.

Unable to beat Toni on recognition, Lilt competed on convenience, and this is the genuinely interesting part rather than the marketing. The universal complaint about home perms was mess: watery lotion running down the neck and face. Lilt introduced a squeeze-bottle applicator that let a user place the chemical precisely on wound curlers, and foam-based neutralisers that clung to the rods instead of running off them.

Both innovations solve the same problem, and it is a problem a professional solves a completely different way. Sectioning, a cotton strip at the hairline, a deliberate application sequence: the salon controls where the chemistry goes with technique. The home market, having no technique available, controlled it with packaging. And the foam neutraliser was good enough that professional formulation went the same way — which makes this one of the few cases where the amateur market improved the professional one. Why placement and dilution matter so much at that second stage is on neutralising a perm.

Procter and Gamble kept Lilt for four decades and sold it in 1990. On the way out, one of its vice presidents said something that puts the whole episode in proportion: Lilt was the company’s first cosmetic hair care product, and the basis for much of its early learning in the hair care area. A boxed perm was the front door through which one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world entered the hair business at all.

A girl’s hair, and a rule of law

Here is what nobody in hairdressing tells you about the home perm brands. They produced a landmark of American product liability law, and it is still taught.

Rogers v. Toni Home Permanent Co. was decided by the Supreme Court of Ohio on 29 January 1958. A girl and her mother had bought a Toni kit marketed as “Very Gentle”. It was used on her according to its own printed directions, and almost all of her hair fell out.

Why that was not, in 1958, a simple case

Under the law as it then stood she had a problem that had nothing at all to do with hair. She had bought the box from a shop, so her contract was with the retailer. She had no contract with the manufacturer. Without a contract there was no privity — the legal relationship that lets one party hold another to a promise — and without privity she could not sue the manufacturer on the promises the manufacturer had made in its own advertising and on its own label.

The company that wrote the words was the one party she could not hold to them.

That was not a quirk of Ohio. It was the general position across the common law world, and it had been for a century. The manufacturer made the claim, the shopkeeper took the money, and liability sat with whoever had happened to hand over the box.

Read that again with a commercial eye. It says that if you spend money persuading a stranger to trust your product, you have taken on a duty to that stranger, and you cannot hide behind the shop counter you sold through. It is one of the decisions that moved American law towards the modern position that a manufacturer answers to the consumer for what its product does — the direction that produced strict product liability over the following decade.

And the fact pattern was a home perm kit, a printed instruction sheet followed correctly, and a child.

Why a hairdresser should know this case

Not for the law. For the phrase used according to the directions.

The kit was not misused. The instructions were followed. The product was called Very Gentle and, for most of the heads it met, it presumably was. The chemistry did what chemistry does on a head it did not suit, and no printed sheet has ever been able to assess the head in front of it.

A box can carry instructions. It cannot carry a diagnosis, and the diagnosis is the service.

That is the whole professional case for my trade, and it was stated more clearly by a court in 1958 than by anybody in the industry since. What a professional actually sells is set out at can your hair take a perm. It is also, incidentally, the reason a modern brand’s gentleness claim is the claim I read most sceptically: “very gentle” is a statement about a formulation, and the question in front of me is always about a person.

The corporate inheritance

The commercial arc is unusually clean. A category was invented in 1944, sold for twenty million dollars in 1948, defended by the most effective advertising of its decade, imitated by the largest consumer goods company in America, and then handed the law a case that made every manufacturer in every industry more answerable than it had been.

What the companies never solved is the thing that ended the boom, and it was never chemical. A box cannot look at hair. The commonest failure in a home perm was, and remains, overlap — fresh lotion carried over lengths that were permed or coloured before, where porous older hair takes the chemistry several times faster than new growth and is finished long before the roots have started. That gap is explained on the porosity guide, and no printed sheet has ever had a way of detecting it.

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