Bad hair day?

Having a bad hair day? Spare some thought for your great-grandparents because in their time it took about 10 hours to complete the process of waving hair to withstand washing, weather and time.

The advent of electricity sparked a major change in the concept of hairdressing when in London in 1906 the hairdresser Karl Nessler – who was called Charles Nestlé – invented the permanent-wave machine.

The bulky machine – about the size of today’s fridge – took almost 20 minutes to get to usable heat and up to 10 hours to complete perming. Still, it was great 20th-century technology and made the perm evermore popular.

Karl Nessler’s electric permanent wave machine, 1909

The next year a Parisian chemistry student, Eugène Schueller founded the company L’Oréal, created a dye to cover gray hair with natural-looking colors in a permanent process, and made life a little more fun for a whole lot of people.