photo of a 1950’s magazine advertisement for a home permanent. (click photo to enlarge >>> |
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| PERMS FOR SALE According to a Life magazine feature story in April of 1955 “every woman in the 1950’s got at least one home perm.” If that wasn’t technically true, it certainly was not for lack of trying on the part of the advertisers. Home permanent ads were big business in the fifties. Makers like the popular Prom home permanents sponsored a number of radio shows. When the makers of Lilt decided to advertise, they took their campaign straight to that wacky curly top, Lucille Ball, star of the tremendously popular sit com, “I Love Lucy.” Other companies had already found success featuring celebrities in magazine ads. In a 1950 ad for Rayve home perms, Mary Martin, then star of the Broadway musical, “South Pacific,” says, “I’ve found a new kind of curler that really holds and curls even tiny wisps. The ad also carried a blurb for “12 new Mary Martin curlers plus a Rayve refill” for only $1.29. In response to the complaints of overly-curly results, an ad for Bobbi picturing young women with softer, wavier hair ran in the May 1954 issue of Good Housekeeping. The text read: “These hairdo’s were made with Bobbi . .the special home permanent for casual hair styles. Shadow Wave, a perm from Pepsodent, once shot a model’s hairdo in seven different styles so that the commercial could be shown at a future date with the most up-to-date hair style. But perhaps the most famous ad campaign for home permanents was the “Which Twin Has the Toni?” campaign. Identical twins were each given a permanent; one a professional beauty parlor wave, the other a Toni home permanent. (Inexplicably, this ad campaign got it's start on the radio.) The ad challenged the reader to guess which twin had been given the Toni. In the print ad, one of the young models says, “My first Toni was the most beautiful wave I’d ever had . my hair never felt so wonderfully soft.” The ad was tremendously popular, so much so that “Toni” became a synonym for home permanent—as in “I’m giving myself a Toni this weekend.” The Toni ad also emphasized the huge savings women could realize from curling at home: an early example set the salon perm at $15.00—the home perm at $2.00. Later ads compared the cost of Toni with the $20* cost of a professional permanent - the asterisk indicating the beauty parlor visit cost included a shampoo and set. Emphasis was on the cost of Toni’s refill kit which only cost a dollar (presumably once you had the curlers, you would need only purchase the refill). Advertisers did not neglect mothers who wanted their own little Curlylocks. The Richard Hudnut Home Permanent for Children advertised in the May issue of Parents magazine that it was safe and “the only permanent specially designed for hard-to-wave children’s hair.” In a 1953 Life magazine advertisement, Lilt Home Permanent advertised the Party Curl, a permanent which would give your child “the prettiest hair in the neighborhood.” The home perm advertising campaigns continued throughout the 50’s with even other products using the perm as a subject for illustration. A 1958 ad for the soft drink 7-up pictures two women each enjoying a “quick refreshing lift” while one woman gives the other a perm.
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Little girls could also become curlytops with the popular permanents for children in the 1950’s. (click to enlarge)
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