104 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS water would produce a curl. We should also note that until com- paratively recently, very little re- search had been done on the nature of. what we call the perm.anent waving of hair. This will become more apparent as we cover the re- cent years of development in this field. Modern, so-called permanent waving started right after the turn of the century in London, England: Three persons, who today are ac- cepted as pioneers in permanent waving, to wit: Charles Nessler, E. Frederics, and Eugene Surer, each working independently, found that the addi. tion of chemicals, •uch as borax, to water, under the in- fluence of heat, would curl hair and would survive several shampooings and washings of the h.air. The method of producing heat, however, was very crude and neces- sitated lon, g hours to produce a curl in. a whole head of hair. After many hit-and-miss experiments, spe- cial electrical heaters were devel- oped, and then complete machines which •:ontained sufficient heaters to heat all the wound strands of hair at the same time. In those days, hair was wound by what is called the spiral system of winding--that is, starting from the roots to the ends. The borax pads were very clumsy, and after baking the hair they had to be chiseled off to break the hard. borax crust. Na- turally, in those days they tried to keep the hair in as good condition as possible, but you can see that after actual baking, at hig-h temperature, the hair was' left in a rather sad state. At that time, however, that was unimportant--the principal objective was to produce a curl which would last a long time. Progress in permanent waving re- mained pretty well static in Europe and England until World War I. At that time Nessler and Frederics came to thJs country, and in 1922 Surer came over to the United States to start his own company. Then, for the first time,øthe prob- lem of rewaving hair presented it- .self, and you might be interested to hear how this was originally han- dled. Two-sectional heaters were constructed which would heat only the lower part of the heater--that is, the section closest to the s6alp--and would heat only slightly, if at all, that portion which was farthest from the scalp. Around 1924 ammonium hydrox- ide first came into use in connection with borax, and, this materially shortened the heating time neces- sary to produce curl. It is inter- esting to note that the introduction of ammonium hydroxide and the subsequent introduction of other chemicals, such as amines, am-. monium derivatives, borates, car- bonates, phosphates and sulfites, were not developed by careful and laborious work. in research labora- tories. The principal manufacturers knew that certain chemicals would wave hair so they mixed up batches of solutions and would then try out each on innumerable heads of hair .. until they ,hit upon a solution which

MIXTURES OF HYDROCARBONS, BEESWAX, AND SPERMACETI 105 would achieve the best results on most types of hair. The strength of the solutions would vary accord- ing to the textures ot hair to be waved, and whereas Nessler segre- gated hair into ten main categories today it is the .general practice to subdivide hair into coarse, medium, and fine, and bleached and dyed. Since it would be impractical for a beautician to have too many solu- tions for the purpose of waving hair, most. manufacturers today confine their solutions to three strengths at the most, and the operator who gives the wave normally test curls the hair with these three solutions if she is not sure of the texture and type. Again going back to the history of this subject--in 1928, Mayer of Germany, developed what is now called the croquignole system of permanent waving that is, winding the hair from the points to the roots on croquignole curlers. Croquignole curiers differ from spiral curiers in that they are thin in the center and gradually thicken toward the ends. This system was introduced in the United States soon thereafter, and like anything new which has merit-- and particularly because it gave extreme ease of operation and ap- plication on the part of beauty shop owners and operators--it spread rapidly through the country. In fact, within seven years it replaced spiral waving up to 98%. Schools, today, do not teach the spiral sys- tem of waving. They concentrate mainly on the point-to-root system which is the basis of machine type waves, machineless type waves, and the new cold waves. We should note that with the be- ginning of the machineless wave-- and byøthis'I mean the application of chemieally produced heat--per- manent waving companies were be- ginning to set up research depart- ments on a small scale, since it re- quired chemical ingenuity and skill to produce proper mixtures for the correct heat in chemical heating pads. Heretofore, engineers were required to make up permanent wav- ing machines, with their intricate heaters and timing mechanisms, but any Tom, Dick, or Harry could mix up a batch of solution in his bath- tub for the purpose of waving hair, and many of the large manufacturers never employed a chemist to mix their solutions and never had any controls on their final results. For instance, such things as per- man•nt waving solutions--particu- larly the ones containing sulfites, which lost their strength very rap- idly due to oxidation--were never attributed to the cause of failures of waves once the solutions reached the beauty shops. Since some of these firms did not employ chemists, who could protect by means of chemicals the loss of strength due to oxidation, they blamed failures upon the incompetence of the operator using their solutions. While it is true that the operators and their skill determine the success of the permanent wa,ee, if the solutions are not up to par even the best operator and artist cannot give a successful wave. It is also true that the best