Perms and Cons

Blog #3

“Grandma combed her hair!” Patty says with disgust. And I wince too, at her description of the sausage-curled bangs and puffy back and sides of the old lady-fro that I had given her on my last visit. Since Grandpa had taken her to some Asian salon and had her cruelly scalped, I had to do her justice by trimming her back into shape and perming the shit out of the rest.

It doesn’t look good for old ladies to have flat gray hair against their skulls; they look generally much happier with nice soft curly hair. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to Grandma’s house every week, so we were forced to make do with a permed poodle do and an occasional shampoo. I had had to make use of the tiny blue perm rods, which make a near pipe-cleaner curl, and dear old Dottie’s hair stuck out from her head in a wispy cloud.

The size of the instrument determines the size of the curl, as perm solution basically disintegrates the hair shaft and re-casts it in the shape of the perm rod. Ammonium thioglycolate. A lovely blend of acid and ammonia, perm solution swells the hair, breaking the disulfide bonds which give the hair shaft its structure. Neutralizing solution oxidizes those bonds back into place just as rubber is vulcanized, given a new firm shape. The hair is permanently waved until it’s cut off.

Grandma’s perm is particularly demanding of me, not because she has so much hair or any technical issue, but because of the logistics. I work at her house and we have to make do with her kitchen chairs and the shower. This particularly is a pain in the ass, with much shuffling of shower chair and garbage bag capes and shower hoses and elderly women. I’m always glad things went according to plan by the time I leave and Grandma’s head is transformed into a pleasant marshmallow of a hairdo.

On old ladies, a perm is the stroke of a genius. On an adolescent girl, it can be a gesture of social suicide. Every girl in my Eighties youth had a perm, especially in fifth or sixth grade, and most of them were horribly misguided. I guess that’s just the learning curve of permanent waves, though, because from the very beginning there have been perm trauma victims. With courtesy to Wikipedia:

An early alternative method for curling hair that was suitable for use on people was invented in 1905 by German hairdresser Charles Nessler (1872–1951). He used a mixture of cow urine and water. The first public demonstration took place on October 8, 1905, but Nessler had been working on the idea since 1896. Previously, wigs had been set with caustic chemicals to form curls, but these recipes were too harsh to use next to human skin. His method, called the spiral heat method, was only useful for long hair. The hair was wrapped in a spiral around rods connected to a machine with an electric heating device. Sodium hydroxide, (caustic soda), was applied and the hair was heated (212°F; 100°C or more) for an extended period of time. The process used about twelve, two-pound brass rollers and took six hours to complete. These hot rollers were kept from touching the scalp by a complex system of countering weights which were suspended from an overhead chandelier and mounted on a stand. His first experiments were conducted on his wife, Katharina Laible. The first two attempts resulted in completely burning her hair off and some scalp burns, but the method was improved and his electric permanent wave machine was used in London in 1909 on the long hair of the time.

Well. See that? Suffering for the sake of beauty is always a noble cause.