Memoirs

Pin Curls and Permanents

I see a bobby pin and a flash of my mother’s face goes across my field of vision. The bobby pin is brown. If it were black, I’d see my Aunt Sadie. Bobby pins must match hair color.

When I was ten or eleven, I used to set my mom’s hair in pin curls. Her hair was fine, not thick, a lovely shade of light brown, short, but not too short. The curls would slip and slide as I wound them around my finger, wet but not dripping. Dryers were reserved for the beauty shop. At home it was au naturale. I made 2 or 3 rows all the way around her head, tucking in the ends, making sure they weren’t squashed or they would come out frizzy.

When I finished, she would fold a small scarf into a triangle, wrap it around and tie it on top with a knot. She looked just like Rosie the Riveter. Her name was Rosie, too. Really Rose, but her family called her Rosie. When her hair was dry, she combed it out and always said it looked great.

As I got older she let me trim the ends and give her home permanents. None ever turned out badly which could happen in the beauty shop. I loved it and pretended I was a female version of Vidal Sassoon. I was always redoing my dolly’s hair, but working on Mommy’s was for real. We usually bought Toni’s. They were the best. Of course, they smelled of ammonia, but that was part of the deal to look pretty. Anyway, the smell took only a week or so and a couple washings to wear off.

We would set up “shop” on the kitchen table where I laid out all my important instruments, combs, scissors, raw cotton, small bowl, towels, curlers carefully laid out in rows, metal clips, waving lotion, neutralizer, and those little end papers that were devils to get apart, but oh so very important. They protected the ends of the hair that were newly trimmed and fragile. The hair could not be bunched in the end papers or the end product would look sorry, like your hair had been cooked with a hot iron. End papers had to be folded in half so I usually prepared several ahead of time. The curlers came in all colors which were related to size so it was easy to pick out the one you needed.

Mommy sat in a kitchen chair covered up with a big towel. I was slow but careful. First, her hair had to be washed and towel-dried, then parted off and clipped into sections for rolling. A rat-tailed comb was essential for measuring just the right amount of hair for the size roller being used. After measuring the hair off, I combed through it, dunked raw cotton in the bowl of waving lotion, sopped it along the measured hair, combed through it again, placed a folded end paper around it, sliding it to the end and making sure the hair was flat and even. Then, continuing to hold the hair with my left hand, I selected the appropriate colored roller with my right, placed it underneath the end of the paper and rolled it under all the way to the scalp, finally snapping the securing bar in place. Thirty to forty rollers later, I would douse on the rest of the waving lotion after carefully tucking in raw cotton around Mommy’s hairline and ears so there were no drips on tender skin. That could burn. She kept a wet washcloth in her hand just in case.

Next I covered her hair with a plastic cap. They called it a cap but it didn’t look much like a cap. More like a bag. We waited however long the “timing” said for the waving lotion to do its thing, fifteen or twenty minutes I think. After so many minutes you had to do a test curl which meant unrolling a roller and looking at how “kinked up” the hair was. When the test curl was to Mommy’s and my satisfaction, the timing was complete. Then it was time to rinse out the waving solution and apply the neutralizer. The neutralizer is what set in the curl. Mommy held her head over the kitchen sink for this part. We rinsed and patted dry. Then I applied the neutralizer until it dripped off her hair into the sink. I carefully removed the curlers and end papers. This was the stinkiest part of the entire enterprise. I worked the rest of the neutralizer through her hair with my fingers. After more timing, all could be rinsed out and shampooed, and if I had done my job well, after towel-drying, Mommy’s hair looked like Shirley Temple’s.

I never could figure out why they were called permanents when they lasted only around three months. Then, you had to do it all over again. In between, we did the pin curl thing with those brown bobby pins. Aunt Sadie never would let me work on her, but that’s another story.