Chapter 37
From preposterously uncomfortable shoes to disfiguring facial injections, the quest for beauty today often involves a considerable amount of misery. But the reality is that modern measures pale next to what women used to endure in the name of vanity, and the LeMur Co. of New York gave passersby a front-row seat to the suffering at a beauty care products show in Los Angeles.
LeMur was demonstrating a Nestle Permanent Wave Machine, a torture-chamber-looking contraption that relied on heated spindles and an alkaline solution to create long-lasting curls. During the two-hour perm process, the two-pound rods were electrified by a chandelier overhead and counterbalanced with weights to hold them away from the scalp. And while it was hardly glamorous—looking more like a fright wig than a beauty tool—the machine was a vast improvement over earlier techniques that were wildly expensive and unpredictably successful.
German-born hairstylist Karl Nessler, who later changed his name to Charles Nestle, had been working to perfect the gizmo since 1896, first publicly debuting a primitive version of it in his London salon in 1906. At that time, the procedure, which was only suitable for long hair, took up to twelve hours and used cow urine as the main ingredient in the alkaline solution. Only eighteen women availed themselves of Nestle’s perms while he was in London, but it wasn’t the prospect of sitting for hours soaked in steaming cow excrement that steered would-be clients away: It was the price tag. Some accounts say an application might cost upwards of $1,000, a coiffure only the highest of society’s upper crust could afford.
But despite the low number of paying customers, Nestle had plenty of opportunity to hone his invention thanks to his wife Katharina, the device’s least-biggest fan and No. 1 guinea pig. He experimented on her hair for three decades, frying it completely off twice and leaving her with serious burns many more times than that. Still, that trial and error was vital to the forward momentum of the idea, and Nestle was slowly cultivating a process that would add glorious curls where there were none, without destroying a woman’s hair in the process.
Nestle’s permanent wave machine was slow to catch on in Europe, but little did Nestle know, hairdressers in the United States were frantically trying to imitate the technology. When WWI pushed Nestle and his wife out of London in 1915 because of their German heritage, they headed for New York, where he found hundreds of copies of his device in use. But none of the salons seemed to have perfected the technique, leaving a vast industry open for Nestle to dominate.
Los Angeles Public Library
Early in the life cycle of the permanent wave invention, demonstrating it at an exposition was risky business. The voltage of early machines could only adequately heat twelve rods at a time, often making two rounds necessary to treat all of a woman’s locks. With applications taking a minimum of six hours to process each—not to mention time spent meticulously wrapping the brass spindles with hair—the lights would long be shut off on a show floor by the time the procedure was finished. Besides that, the outcome was never guaranteed, and a model with a frizzed-out mess or patches of burned-off hair would do far more to hurt the cause than help it.
But by the mid-1920s, Nestle had the perm process down to a science, using as many heated rods as needed and sodium hydroxide rather than urine to produce generally predictable results within two hours. New techniques and technologies, like those shown in the photo here, made it possible to curl even the bobbed haircuts that became all the rage during the roaring ’20s, and women with hair of every length were lining up to lose their pin-straight tresses.
With those advancements, Nestle quickly became a stanchion of the styling industry, opening salons across the country and, by 1927, boasting more than 500 employees and an advertising budget of $300,000. Nestle sold his patents to beauty supply manufacturer LeMur Co. in 1928 for $1.5 million—more than enough to buy his loyal Katharina all of the burn tonics and wigs she could ever want.
The Nestle brand had become so synonymous with a good permanent wave that LeMur Co. modified the company’s name to include it, and by 1953, Nestle-LeMur Co. was one of the thirty largest cosmetics and hair-care companies in the world.
As for Nestle, though the stock market crash of 1929 is said to have nearly wiped out his considerable wealth, he had other inventions up his sleeve. Nestle is also credited with being the creator of ready-made false eyelashes, which consisted of lashes sewn to a thin strip of fish bladder then affixed to a woman’s eye with “skin fluid” that could make them stay adhered for weeks. Historians suggest his loyal wife Katharina was by his side throughout that creative phase as well, though they don’t mention whether she managed to keep her sight in the process.