October 27, 1927
Los Angeles
Of course we know that pigtails have gone the way of the dodo for the li’l ‘uns, torn asunder by the terrible rake of modernity, but we never thought the bob would be stomped extinct by carnality and venality, modernity’s ugly little twins. But the bob is gone! Long live the permanent wave!
Here, five year-old Dottie Landvogt, of the Seventy-Sixty Street Landvogts, sits at Johanna’s Permanent Wave Shop in the Pantages Building on Broadway. She’s hooked up to one of those Charles Nessler contraptions—a crazy of octopus holding two-pound brass rollers on a system of counterweights, suspended from a chandelier; the curlers, filled with a Borax paste reagent, are electrically heated to 200+ degrees to boil and steam the hair and, because Nessler didn’t have a shop in Los Angeles, this was probably one of the many cheap knock-off machines. Which meant Dot likely ended up with a nicely burned scalp to match her ‘do.
But such is the price of beauty.
By the time Dorothy is ten, heatless waves will be all the rage, so we wish her the best of luck in still having hair.