(The following is an adapted excerpt from the new book, Kink in the Timeline: How the Modern Hair Crimping Iron Changed History, by Madelynn R. Rouge, licensed hair stylist and author of the best-selling 'Permanent' Record: My Life as an Award-Winning Stylist.)
After the invention of aerosol hairspray can in 1956 and the creation of handheld blowdryers in 1971, the debut of the hair crimping iron in 1972 stands as the most important haircare product design of the last half of the twentieth century.
The Seventies was a big decade, and few celebrities were bigger than Barbra Streisand. A young stylist by the name of Geri Cusenza was one of the stylists lucky enough to work with Ms. Streisand during this period. Cusenza, who would go on to win numerous awards (including a 1995 North American Hairstyling Award) and found, with her husband, the famous haircare company, Sebastian, was spending hours braiding and unbraiding her client’s hair to achieve a tight wave.
It is usually at this time during my talks to hair clubs and beauty schools that I pause to explain the great star, Barbra Streisand. Unfortunately, reader, many of us continue to get older while those entering our profession remain a blissfully ignorant (yet still intelligent!) 18-24 years old.
I usually start out by explaining to the sea of pink hair and nose rings that Barbra had been (and still is!) well known for the songs she sang, the movies she sang them in and the male co-stars she serenaded both on- and off-screen, all while sporting a non-traditional (some might say “ethnic”) look that made her immediately recognizable and strangely attractive. On one such occasion, I was right in the middle of explaining why, in The Way We Were, someone as beautiful as Robert Redford would choose a Jewish queen like Barbra, when a young man covered in white makeup, black lipstick and jetblack hair stood and screamed at me.
“Don’t be such a hater. Some of us know who Barbra is,” He said. “Some of us think she’s beautiful and some of us know that she’s a real hero!”
And while I’m not old-fashioned at all, it was nice to see that even a world as rigid and conservative as the hairstyling industry has become open enough to welcome people who practice “alternative lifestyles.”
Anyway, it was during a marathon braiding session in early 1971 that Geri Cusenza, working through what I can only guess was excruciating finger pain, began searching for a better way to achieve the look her client wanted. I imagine that she stifled the desire to verbalize her pain, as many clients do when you accidentally tug too hard when applying a difficult weave, and instead turned her attention to ways to make her job easier.
While Cusenza has yet to pen her own autobiography (Dish the dirt, Geri. It’s not that hard, girl!) I’d like to think that she thought first of mechanical robot hands that could accomplish the braiding task faster. Of course, research she invariably undertook at the time would have revealed not only the crude mechanics of Seventies-era robotics but the primitive control software of the time.
All the while, Geri continued to braid and unbraid. Finally, inspiration hit and she cobbled together her first prototype. That iron, which later became the modern hair crimper and is probably now gathering dust in the basement of the Smithsonian, was the result of hours of frustration and hundreds of miles of braids. But like all great inventions, Cusenza’s tool would take years to find appreciation.
As Bea Arthur can attest, the Seventies quickly turned into the Eighties and tastes changed. Barbra Streisand’s first role of the new era, Cheryl Gibbons in All Night Long, was considered a misstep by critics, and things looked much worse for the crimped look. That all changed when young stars like Jodie Foster, Alyssa Milano and others listened to the counsel of wise stylists and brought the look in to the open.
The Eighties, became, in time, the decade of the hair crimper. After John Hughes’ movies, cocaine use and shoulder-mounted boomboxes, crimped hair (and, by association, the hair crimper) has come to represent the free-spirited return to innocence that was the 1980’s.
