MODERN LIVING: The Great Wave

In the Germany of 70 years ago, in a little Black Forest town, Charles Nessler collected hair. Little Charles snitched samples at the local barbershop, snipped tresses from the village maidens. He wanted to find the answer to a mystery; What makes hair curl? When he grew up, Nessler became a barber and moved to London, where he invented a method of making false eyelashes, sold upwards of 10,000 a month.

After 20 years of experimenting, he solved his mystery. He discovered that if hair is soaked in an alkali solution and heated in a curl, it will stay curled. Thus the permanent wave was born. Not content with his triumph, Nessler was busy on many another front. He patented more than a score of hairdressing devices (curlers, solutions, testing machines) and licensed operators all over the world to use them. He came to the U.S. and made a fortune.

Last week, in Harrington Park, N.J., 78-year-old Charles Nessler died. Though he had frittered away most of his fortune on such inventions as a massaging machine to keep the skin young, Nessler left an impressive memorial: the billion-dollar-a-year U.S. beauty-parlor industry, which owes its existence to Nessler’s permanent wave.

Boyish Bob. Until the permanent wave came to the U.S., women relied on temporary Marcel* waves or the local wigmaker for their curls. But wigs were just basic units; it took extra braids, rolls, puffs and switches to be in high style. Nessler’s permanent changed all that; women could forget about their waves for months at a time. As acceptance of his wave grew, prices came down. Beauty shops, of which there had been only some 3,000 in 1908, sprang up everywhere.

To supply them, scores of companies began to make electric eyebrow tweezers, hair dryers, lotions, face and scalp vibrators, automatic foot and leg massagers, and hundreds of other products, right down to special beauty-parlor furniture. Last year $100 million worth of such products were made, including about 10,000 permanent-wave machines, about 45,000 dryers, and more than 600 million pads used for protecting the scalp while the hair is being waved.

Quantity & Quality. But the biggest part of the business is still the beauty parlor, of which there are now 127,000. They employ 350,000 people (a skilled operator in an expensive shop makes upwards of $100 a week) and take in better than $1 billion a year. To them each week troop some 3,750,000 U.S. women, who spend an average of more than $5 per visit. The beauty parlors (known in the trade as salons) offer everything from pedicures, manicures and facials to “body-contouring” (pummeling and steaming), supply false eyelashes, fingernails and “transformations” (false hair). Best & Co.’s store on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue claims to have the biggest salon; there 60 men & women operators tend a bank of 100 dryers, beautify as many as 500 customers a day.

Hair-Pulling. Three years ago, the beauty parlors got a scare. Home permanents became phenomenally successful. They were old stuff (Nessler had invented a home kit 40 years before and sold as many as 2,000 a day), but now they were plugged by a new method and about $2,600,000 a year in advertising. Clubs were formed, where women gave each other permanents. Though one beauty-parlor operator cracked that the women “did more hair-pulling than waving,” the beauty-parlor business slumped 40%.

The panicky beauty industry lobbied in state legislatures to get laws passed banning home permanents, then shrewdly cashed in on what had looked like misfortune. The salons switched over almost entirely to cold permanents (i.e., machineless), and even advertised “hair-reconditioning” treatments to fix up the many women who had done their homework wrong.

Beauty parlors hope to cash in the same way on the latest craze—home dyeing. A $2 home rinse called Tintair, launched only four months ago, is expected to bring in $30 million this year. (Four out of every ten U.S. women color their hair.) But beauty parlors are not worried. Says one operator: “Home rinses are making all women hair-color conscious, and sooner or later they come to us for a professional job. Why, kids of eight are trying out home coloring, and they’ll be customers for us that much sooner.”

Nor is the beauty industry worried about the return of a defense economy. In World War II its business doubled.

* Named for Henri Marcel, who devised a method of waving hair temporarily.