Perms we loved and loathed
Every issue, Yours writer Marion Clarke will be reliving the best bits of our lives. This fortnight she recalls the grief we endured to have curly hair…!
Iwas either a slow learner or a hopeless optimist because I suffered several home perm disasters before I got the message that my fine, straight hair was never going to be miraculously transformed into the softly curling locks of my dreams. Despite being named after Shirley Temple, Shirley Balmforth’s crowning glory was as straight as mine, but her mum soon changed that. “She bought the dreaded packet containing a Twink perm. I had to sit for ages while my hair was sectioned and covered in tissue papers before being wound round the blue plastic curlers. Each curler was liberally dabbed with the lotion which had to stay on until the perm had set before it was rinsed off.” Charmaine Fletcher’s mother was equally keen for her children to have gorgeous curls. “Even my brothers were subjected to Toddy Locks, a curling solution for babies, and I endured hideous perms from the age of seven. “Later, I wanted a shaggy perm – a must for teenage girls in the Seventies. Alas, the hairdresser used insufficient solution – one side curled but the other didn’t! Panicking, the hairdresser cut it shorter, saying it was too long to take the perm, but it looked worse. My mother bought me heated rollers to use on the offending side until it grew out.” Setting lotion was a vital step in the perming process – and one that could go horribly wrong, as Pam Jones discovered when she persuaded her mother to give her a home perm. “After she had applied the lotion, I lay across the bed for the half hour as stated in the instructions. I had my head hanging over the side so the bowl on the floor would catch the drips. The next thing we knew, we woke with a start and realised we had nodded off for two hours! “It was panic stations as Mum tried to unwind what seemed like a hundred curlers welded tightly to my scalp while I screamed with pain and fright. I ended up with a head full of crinkly curls that no amount of washing would loosen. My lank hair has been a problem all my life, but no more perms for me.” A little white lie almost led to the end of a friendship for Carole Hughes. “In the Sixties, a friend asked me to give her a home perm. As she was blonde I asked her if she bleached her hair. She assured me that it was natural, but when I went to take the curlers out her hair was stuck like glue! “She went home very upset and was late coming to work the next day as she had been to the hairdresser who had no alternative but to cut her long hair close to her head. It looked awful! She then admitted that she regularly bleached it with neat peroxide! She forgave me eventually but it was an experience I’ll never forget.” An experience Elizabeth Hiddleston will never forget happened when she was in hospital in the Fifties. When fellow patients decided to give her a PROM home perm after lights out, they were disturbed by the approach of the night sister. “We had to jump back into our beds – no time to rinse my hair. At breakfast, Sister Stewart made no comment about the plastic curlers I ws still wearing. The only way to remove them was with scissors. I was not a pretty sight.” When Barbara Nuttall’s mum and her sisters experimented with Tweeny Twinks perms, her dad decided he didn’t want to be left out. “So Mum did one for him. He was sitting with his curlers in when my auntie turned up unexpectedly. Dad ran into the kitchen and grabbed his cap. He sat there for
three hours waiting for her to go home so that he could wash it off. Auntie kept asking, ‘What’s that smell?’ although she never asked why he was wearing his cap. Needless to say, Dad just ended up with a head full of frizz, not curls!” Who can forget the awful smell of the setting lotion? Sue Marner, who unwisely went to a party immediately after having a perm, likens it to rotten eggs and says: “I didn’t have many friends that day!” Mary Archer had a similar reaction when she was 14 and wanted to have curly hair. Her mother obliged by giving her a Pin-Up home perm. “What torture it was, but I persevered. I rushed off to the youth club where I joined my friends at the pool table. ‘Heck, what is that dreadful smell?’ said one of the boys and everyone looked at me. “No idea,” I bravely lied. I never got to like that smell, but endured several more Pin-Up perms before I could afford a proper hairdresser.” But maybe there were worse things to endure in the name of beauty? Jennifer Whittington reckons so. “I think those who had home perms were very lucky. When I was little Mum used to put pipe cleaners in my hair and my sister’s. We slept in them and in the morning we had curly hair, which we loved, but by lunchtime the curls had dropped out.”