Chapter 2 · 1872

The Marcel wave

In 1872 a Paris hairdresser named Marcel Grateau put a heated iron to a client's hair and pulled it through in a single reversing stroke. What he produced was not a curl but a wave — a crisp, continuous, horizontal S-curve that held its shape until the next wash. He gave it his own name. The "Marcel wave" was the first curling technique in Europe to be a brand as well as a craft, and the immediate ancestor of everything the salon and the machine would do next. It was still, emphatically, temporary.

The history of the lasting curl is usually told as a story of chemistry and electricity, of borax and brass rods and the first machine of 1906. But before any of that, it is a story of technique — of a particular way of holding a hot iron — and of a name. For thirty years before Nessler plugged in his machine, the wave that bore Grateau's name was the standard against which every other method measured itself, and the look against which every later fashion in waved hair was defined. To understand why the permanent wave mattered, one must first understand the temporary one, and the man who made it famous.

Fig. 1. The Marcel waving iron and the wave it cut. The iron's two jaws curved — one convex, one concave — so that they nested together and creased the hair rather than rolling it into a ringlet. Drawn through a dampened lock in a single, alternately reversed stroke, it laid down a continuous horizontal S-curve: the "Marcel wave," crisp, regular, and reproducible. (Author's line drawing after period examples in the Science Museum Group collection.)

Grateau and the Paris salon

The man who gave his name to the wave was born François Marcel Grateau on 18 October 1852, not in Paris but in the small town of Chauvigny, near Poitiers in western France. He came to the capital as a young man and entered the trade of the coiffeur — the hairdresser — at a moment when Paris was becoming the undisputed capital of fashionable hair. The Second Empire and the early Third Republic had filled the city with theatres, photographers, and a new class of clients who wanted, and could pay for, a hairstyle worth being seen in. By the early 1870s Grateau was working in the modest salons of Montmartre, on the city's northern heights, far from the grand houses of the boulevards but close enough to the stage world to learn what actresses and dancers wanted their hair to do.

What they wanted, by every account, was movement. The ringlets of the Victorian dressing-room — tight, vertical, made by winding hair around the barrel of a curling iron — were going out of fashion, replaced by a demand for softer, broader, horizontal undulation that framed the face without the stiffness of a curl. Grateau is said to have been struck, as a boy, by the natural wave in his mother's hair, and to have spent years trying to reproduce it artificially. The result, introduced to his Paris clientele in 1872, was the technique he called simply l'ondulation — the waving — and that the trade would soon call the ondulation Marcel, the Marcel wave.

1872
Paris

Grateau introduces the waving technique to his Paris clientele. The method is a guarded secret at first — he works behind closed doors, and the iron itself is not publicly sold for years — but the look is unmistakable, and within a decade the ondulation Marcel is the most sought-after style in the capital. Actresses, courtesans, and the ladies of the new republican bourgeoisie all want it, and the salons of the rue Saint-Honoré and the boulevards soon send their apprentices to learn it.

Grateau himself became a figure of international standing. In later life he emigrated to the United States, dropped the family name Grateau, and worked under the name François Marcel Woelfflé — an identity he used to patent and promote his irons abroad. (His New York Times obituary in 1936 noted, with some amusement, that he had "dropped his family name" entirely.) He died in 1936, in his eighty-fourth year, having outlived the temporary wave he had invented by long enough to see it supplanted by the permanent one. He was, by every measure, the first hairdresser whose name became a household word across two continents.

The waving iron and l'ondulation

The instrument that produced the wave looked, to a casual eye, like an ordinary pair of curling tongs. It was not. The standard nineteenth-century iron had two straight or cylindrical barrels, designed to wrap a lock of hair into a spiral curl. Grateau's iron was shaped differently: its two jaws were curved — one convex, the other concave — so that when closed they nestled into one another and creased the hair along a gentle horizontal arc, rather than rolling it into a ringlet. The result of a single closing was not a curl but a fold: a ridge, with the hair drawn smoothly into a shallow peak.

The technique was the more important innovation. Instead of winding the hair around the iron, the hairdresser drew the closed, heated iron along a dampened section of hair in a single continuous stroke, then opened it, shifted it a little, and drew it back the opposite way — reversing the direction of the crease with each pass. Down-stroke, up-stroke, down-stroke: each reversal laid a fresh ridge running counter to the last, and the ridges chained together into a continuous, regular, horizontal S-curve. The wave was not a row of separate curls; it was a single corrugated line, smooth and even, running the length of the hair. It looked, contemporaries said, as though the hair had been pressed in a crimping machine — and indeed the principle was closer to crimping than to curling. This alternating, reversed stroke is the whole signature of the method. It is what made a "Marcel wave" a Marcel wave, and not just another curl.

The 1880s–90s
European salons

The technique spreads from Paris across the salons of Europe. It demands skill — the iron must be hot enough to set the crease but not so hot as to scorch, and the reversed stroke must be timed to the cooling of the hair — and so it becomes the mark of a properly trained hairdresser. Trade manuals of the period codify the four basic manipulations of the Marcel iron: the ridge, the reverse ridge, the wave, and the finishing curl. A whole vocabulary of waved hairdressing grows up around the tool, and remains in the textbooks for the next half-century.

The look was striking and, for the period, modern. Where the ringlet had been vertical and dense, the Marcel wave was horizontal and open; it lay close to the head, caught the light along its ridges, and moved with the wearer. Photography, which had become cheap and widespread by the 1880s, carried the style across the world in the portraits of actresses and society women. The wave suited the new, less elaborate fashions of the late nineteenth century — the smaller hats, the looser silhouettes — far better than the architectural ringlets of the previous generation ever could. It was, in a real sense, the first hairstyle designed for the camera.

The Marcel iron did not curl the hair. It creased it — and a crease, drawn in alternately reversed strokes, chains into a wave.

Why it spread

Within twenty years of its introduction, the Marcel wave was the salon standard across Europe and the wider Western world. The reasons were practical as much as aesthetic. The wave could be produced quickly — a skilled hairdresser could wave a whole head in under an hour, where setting ringlets had taken far longer. It required no chemicals and no special setting pastes, only the iron, a little water, and a steady hand. It suited hair of almost any length, and could be dressed into the elaborate pinned-up styles of the 1890s as easily as worn loose. And it had a name — a name that travelled, that advertised itself, and that clients could ask for by a single word.

That last point mattered more than its modesty suggests. Before the Marcel wave, curling had been a generic service: the client asked for curls, and the hairdresser produced them with whatever method came to hand. The Marcel wave was the first curling technique to be a branded, named, taught, and reproducible method — something a hairdresser could be trained in, certified in, and charged a premium for. Grateau and his imitators ran schools; trade journals described the technique step by step; manufacturers sold "Marcel irons" as a distinct product line. The wave became, in other words, the first curl that was also a profession. The infrastructure of the modern salon — the training, the branded tools, the named techniques — descends in a straight line from the trade Grateau built around his iron in the 1880s.

The style proved durable in fashion, too. The Gibson Girl of the 1890s wore it softly waved; the actresses of the Edwardian stage wore it more severely; and when the cinema arrived in the 1900s, its leading ladies wore it on screen, beaming the wave to audiences who had never set foot in a Paris salon. By the turn of the century the Marcel wave was simply what fashionable hair looked like, from London to Buenos Aires, and it would remain the dominant waved style until the bob and the permanent machine remade the field in the 1920s.

The limits of heat

For all its success, the Marcel wave shared the great weakness of every method that had come before it: it was undone by water. The iron set the hair by heat alone. Dampening the hair before waving softened the shaft so that it would take the crease; the heat then fixed that crease as the hair cooled and dried. But nothing in the process altered the structure of the hair at the molecular level. The disulfide bonds in the keratin — the chemical links that actually hold a hair's shape, and whose rearrangement would prove to be the whole secret of a lasting wave — were untouched. The Marcel wave was a heat-set shape, and a heat-set shape dissolves the moment the hair is wet again. A single washing took it out entirely.

This meant that the wave, however crisp and beautiful in the morning, was a daily manufacture. Women of means had it re-set two or three times a week in the salon; those without that luxury re-set it at home, or slept in it carefully and hoped it would hold another day. The setting pastes inherited from the Victorian dressing-room — the gum arabic, the borax, the sugar water — could prolong it a little, buying extra hours or an extra night, but none of them could carry it past a wash. The chemistry of a true permanent wave was still a generation away.

There was a second, more immediate limit: the heat itself. A Marcel iron that was too hot scorched the hair, burning a brittle, broken patch into the shaft that no amount of dressing could hide. The danger was familiar to every hairdresser and every client; the smell of singed hair was, by reputation, the smell of a Paris dressing-room gone wrong. The skill of the technique lay as much in judging the temperature of the iron — tested, traditionally, against a sheet of paper held between the jaws — as in the reversed stroke itself. Grateau's method was safer than the bare-tongs work of the previous century, but it was still a hot iron applied to a client's head, and it still demanded judgement at every pass.

The Marcel wave was crisp, regular, and reproducible. It was also gone by the next wash — exactly as the ringlet had been, three thousand years earlier.

The bridge to the bob

So the Marcel wave stood at the end of the nineteenth century: the most successful, the most widely adopted, and the most technically refined temporary wave the world had yet seen — and still, at bottom, a daily visitor like every curl before it. It had solved the problem of technique: how to wave hair quickly, crisply, and reproducibly. It had not solved the problem of permanence: how to make the wave survive water. That problem, unsolved since the bronze foundries of the Nile, now pressed harder than it ever had, because the wave was everywhere, and the cost of re-setting it — in salon fees, in hours, in scorched hair — was paid by millions of women every week.

Two forces would soon make the temporary wave wholly inadequate. The first was chemistry: the discovery, in the closing years of the century, that the keratin shaft could be reshaped at the level of its disulfide bonds, and that this reshape — unlike a heat-set crease — could be fixed so as to survive water. The second was fashion: the arrival, after the First World War, of the bob — short, blunt, and quite incompatible with the long-hair spiral methods on which the early permanent machines depended. The bob would create an explosive new demand for waving on hair too short to spiral, and would force the invention of the flat-winding technique that carried the hot perm into the mass market.

But the first step belonged to neither chemistry nor fashion. It belonged to a machine. In a London salon in 1906, a German hairdresser named Karl Ludwig Nessler wound a client's hair onto brass rods, soaked it in borax, and switched on an electric current. The curl that resulted was painful to receive and dangerous to administer — and it lasted. The permanent wave had arrived. The Marcel wave, the temporary standard that had ruled for thirty years, would now have to make way for it.

Sources & further reading