Zotos

A pad that made its own heat

The business dates its founding to 1929. What is documented far more precisely is what it patented four years later.

US 1,920,758, “Hair waving pad”, was filed on 4 January 1933 by Everett G. McDonough of Mount Vernon, New York, and assigned to the Zotos Corporation of New York. It covers a sachet of exothermic powder — calcium oxide — which heats when moistened, so that a wave could be set, in the patent’s own words, “without requiring application of heat from an outside source”. This was hardware for the machineless wave that was then displacing the electrical perming machine, and which has its own account on machineless perms.

The novelty is smaller and more practical than the legend around it. The company’s own current material says it revolutionised the industry by inventing the machineless permanent wave. The patent does not support that as written: the machineless principle was already in use, and what McDonough claimed was an envelope arriving pre-perforated under a peel-off seal, so the operator did not have to pierce it by hand at the chair.

That is a manufacturing improvement, and a good one. It is not the origin of the idea, and the company’s own paperwork is the thing that says so.

I dwell on this because it sets the pattern for the whole page. The Zotos record is unusually well documented and almost every claim made about it in trade material is slightly larger than the document underneath.

The name on the bottle, and the company behind it

By the 1940s the Zotos name and McDonough’s work sat with a New York company called Sales Affiliates, Inc. A 1948 press release quoted in the later litigation describes its products as “the well-known Zotos and Jamal Machineless and Lustron Cold Permanent Waves”.

Sales Affiliates went on to register a run of perming marks — Fluid Wave and Zotos Fluid Wave in 1952, Tubewave in 1954, Sheer-Test paper wraps for cold permanent waving in 1955 — alongside the Inecto hair colour name. How the Zotos Corporation of the 1933 patent became Sales Affiliates is not established by any source I have found, and I would rather leave that as a gap than fill it with a plausible guess. Merger, rename, sale or licence: the record does not say.

The application that actually mattered

On 16 June 1941 McDonough, by then of Yonkers, New York, applied for “Permanent waving compositions and methods”. The first claim covers a mercaptan of molecular weight below 121, in alkaline solution, at a pH above 7 and not above 9.5, at roughly one to ten per cent.

Strip the patent language out of that and you have thioglycolate cold waving exactly as it is still practised. Note the pH in particular. McDonough’s claim — above 7 and not above 9.5 — is the range a modern alkaline perm still runs in, and it is also, by coincidence or by good sense, where the current European regulatory ceiling sits. This library gives an alkaline wave as about 9 to 9.5 on every page, and the reason it never goes higher is that both the law and the 1941 claim stop there. The arc is on pH and perms.

What this page will not claim

Sources disagree on who invented the cold wave, and a page carrying the Zotos lineage is the last page that should award the crown. Cosmetology textbooks most often credit Arnold F. Willat — one T, of San Rafael, California, and no document places him in Britain. The patent record credits McDonough in the early 1940s. Earlier than either, the Leeds textile chemist J. B. Speakman filed in Great Britain in December 1934 for setting keratin by reduction at room temperature followed by oxidation. All three claims are weighed on the cold wave. Zotos did not invent the cold wave in any settled sense. What the record supports is that no company did more to make it commercial.

Ten years to get it, under three years to lose it

First, money arrived. On 27 January 1948 Sales Affiliates and Procter and Gamble signed an agreement under which Procter and Gamble paid $300,000 as advance royalties, in exchange for a non-exclusive licence, a security interest, and being told what Sales Affiliates knew about cold waving compositions. Sales Affiliates kept everything that mattered day to day: the right to prosecute the application, license it, sue infringers and keep the recoveries. When the patent finally issued, its printed front page named Procter and Gamble of Cincinnati as assignee — the same company then selling Lilt, its own boxed home perm, which is on the home perm boom.

Getting it issued took ten years. The Patent Office rejected the application for seven of them, and US 2,577,710 was granted on 4 December 1951 only after Sales Affiliates won a suit in the District Court for the District of Columbia compelling issuance.

Then the company took the position that its patent covered essentially every cold waving composition and method on the market, and enforced it hard. Ruling on procedural motions in 1952, Judge Irving R. Kaufman of the Southern District of New York described the company’s manoeuvring as forum shopping with a vengeance, and observed that it had acquired a reputation in at least some of the trade as a litigious organisation.

On 30 April 1954 the same judge held US 2,577,710 invalid. The claims were indefinite and carried new matter; the limits McDonough had stated turned out not to be critical in fact; and the invention was anticipated, principally by Speakman’s second United States patent and his Canadian patent. Among the other references cited against it was an earlier depilatory patent in the names of Evans and McDonough — the company’s own chemistry helping to destroy its own monopoly.

Zotos lost the exclusive right to the cold wave and went on selling cold waves anyway, as did everybody else. The patent had failed; the product had not.

That outcome is the reason perming is ordinary. Had 1954 gone the other way, one company would have held the exclusive right to the only commercially viable perm chemistry in the largest market in the world. Instead the chemistry stayed open and every salon could buy into it.

Conair, Shiseido, Henkel — and the word on the bottle never changed

By the late 1970s the perming patents were being assigned to a successor named Zotos International, Inc.

1. 1983 — Conair. Conair Corporation bought Zotos for $71 million. Published company histories do not name the seller, and I will not guess at one.
2. 1988 — Shiseido. Conair sold Zotos International to Shiseido, whose own filings confirm the business joined the group that year. The price is given as more than $329 million in one company history and $345 million in a trade report; neither is settled, so both are here.
3. 2017 — Henkel. Shiseido announced the sale on 27 October 2017 to Henkel AG & Co. KGaA of Dusseldorf for USD 485 million. Henkel confirmed the deal closed on 29 December 2017, gave Zotos’s fiscal 2016 sales as about $230 million, and named Zotos Professional and Joico as the leading professional brands acquired.

Three owners since 1983, run for most of that time out of Darien, Connecticut, and the name on the bottle never moved. It is worth holding onto when a representative tells you a brand carries close to a century of heritage. Usually that heritage lives in the name and in a lineage of formulations, not in a continuous company.

There is also a quiet closing of a circle in the patent record. The cysteamine perm patents filed in the early 1990s by Helene Curtis — the company whose earlier litigation helped destroy the Zotos cold wave patent — were assigned to Zotos International in 1997. The gentlest chemistry the company now sells arrived from its old adversary.

Four perm families, not three

Zotos Professional’s current catalogue runs to four perm families, and the count matters because most write-ups list three and miss one. Classified by the company’s own 2024 reference chart:

Design Freedom is a conventional alkaline wave and its published ingredient declaration says so plainly: ammonium hydroxide, ammonium thioglycolate, diammonium dithiodiglycolate, water. That is about as unambiguous as a label gets, and it is a useful thing to be able to read. Its selling point is a choice of wrap — water for softer, more open curl, lotion for firmer — which is the modern packaging of an old truth: technique creates the shape and chemistry sets its strength.

Texture EFX is sold explicitly as thio-free cysteamine, and here the company’s own label is doing honest work. Thio-free in trade usage means free of ammonium thioglycolate; it does not mean free of sulphur chemistry, because cysteamine is itself a thiol reducer. It sits near the mild end of the ladder: gentler than an alkaline wave, harsher than sulphite. That family is on the thio-free cysteamine perm, and it is the same chemistry a modern American niche brand is built on, which is on Curl Cult.

The research record is still active: patents assigned to Zotos International include a leave-on oxidising solution for waving in 1999, an ammonium bisulphite and ethanolamine sulphite system in 2009, and two on reducing the smell of permed hair — odour being, still, one of the most cited reasons a client refuses a perm.

Three things this company’s record is good for

The chemistry on the trolley is the chemistry in the claim. A modern alkaline perm is ammonium thioglycolate at about pH 9 to 9.5, followed by an oxidising neutraliser. McDonough’s 1941 first claim — a small mercaptan, alkaline, above 7 and not above 9.5 — still describes it more than eighty years on. Very little in perming has actually been replaced; a great deal has been repackaged. See the alkaline perm.

Attribution is not contribution. Zotos cannot be called the inventor of the cold wave and this library does not say it was. It can be called the company that turned a laboratory principle into a trolley product and a system stylists were trained on, which is a different achievement and arguably a larger one.

Read the label, not the heritage. A brand’s age tells you nothing about what is in the bottle in front of you. The ingredient declaration does. Design Freedom’s four-item INCI list tells you more about what is going to happen to a client’s hair than ninety years of corporate history, and it is printed on the box.

Questions