I remember having my hair put in rags (strips of cotton cloth) to make ringlets. I was nine at the time. My cousin was getting married and I presented her with a silver horseshoe. When I was about seventeen I had a 'professional' perm. I'm another one with porous hair. Oh dear! The frizz! I thought and felt I looked like Ena Sharples! Never again.
Never had a perm in my life but I do remember my Aunt May had some sort of prehistoric curling tongs and used to curl my hair with those…😬 I would’ve been about six or seven at the time but I’ve never forgotten it…🤦♀️😳😁
I Don't know, but, I do remember the 'Afro's in the 80's. I treated myself to one, and was pleased until I went to meet my daughter from school. She was horrified and remembers to this day her first sight of me and my Afro.
My Mum was a frustrated hairdresser. Her dad forbade her to train as a hairdresser, saying that inhaling ammonia fumes would give her TB!
Consequently, I was her model for haircuts and perms. The haircuts were usually disastrous, with me ending up looking like a boy because she had to keep cutting bits off to "straighten it up". I too vividly remember her perming my hair and me having to go to school looking even more unattractive than usual.
No Christmas perms / twinks here but I do remember a time in the 80’s when lots of us had curly perms in a long bob shape, held in place with a headband.
End result should have been my hair falling straight to my shoulders and then flicking up. It fell to my shoulders alright and then there was a great frizz, like tangled fishing line.
Once only for me too as a 'treat' for passing the 11-plus. I didn't care but my mum wanted me to have the flick up style. A real hairdresser did it and it was fine until the first wash - then it went into corkscrew sort of ringlets 😁.
No Twinking for me, I'm glad to say, and I don't think my classmates got it either.
Remember the magazine diagrams of how to put rollers in to get a desired style ?
I did have a Princess Ann doll DaisyAnne maybe you are right that's where she got her ideas from. Mum also had a head of strawberry blonde curls herself mine was blonde and as straight as a horse's tail like my dad's.
The smell, the papers and the roller/rod things - any perm on me as a teenager was disastrous! It took years for a ‘real hairdresser’ to tell me my hair was extra porous and warned never to be talked into having a perm, even in the best salon, ever again. Lesson learned.
Once and once only when I was about fourteen I think. End result should have been my hair falling straight to my shoulders and then flicking up. It fell to my shoulders alright and then there was a great frizz, like tangled fishing line. I chopped it all off and my mother was horrified. By the next summer it was back to shoulder length and straight. I have never had anything like a perm since. Traumatised I was.
The thread about Christmas presents of the '50s reminded me of my other Christmas "Treat". Every year at Christmas my mother home permed my hair with a product called "Twink". The result was I had to go to school with a head full of frizzy hair and sit with other girls who had been tortured the same. Did anybody else suffer the same indignity? My gran went to the hairdressers as did many of her friends for their Christmas perm.