Nestle, Chls
NAME:
Nestle, Charles (born Nessler, Karl Ludwig)
ACHIEVEMENTS:
Hair waving.
NICKNAME/ALIAS:
None
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH:
2 May 1872, Todtnau, Germany
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH:
22 January 1951, Harrington Park, NJ. Aged 79
DISCIPLINE:
Hairdresser
FIELD:
Hairdressing
LANGUAGE:
German/English
PARENTS:
Father: Bartholomew Nessler
Mother: Rosina Laitner
SIBLINGS:
?
SPOUSE:
Katherine Laible
CHILDREN:
4
EDUCATION:
?
MAJOR WORK:
Nestle, Charles, The Story of Hair, 1928
LIFE AND TIMES:
Nessler, the son of a shoemaker, was always fascinated by hair. He worked as a barber's apprentice before going to Switzerland and working in the watch and electric goods
businesses. He returned to hairdressing and while working in salons he studied hair and how it reacted to being cut and waved.
In 1899, at the age of twenty-seven, Nestle moved to Paris to study the technique for waving hair which had been developed (in 1872) by Henri Marcel. Nestle eventually got a job in a fashionable salon where the technique was in use and while there he began to work on a process of his own for waving hair.
To make a wave permanent, it was necessary to boil, bake or steam the hair. Nessler
was the first person to do it "reasonably" safely. He impressed one rich English client so much that she persuaded him to move to London and set up there.
It was at this time, around 1900, that he adopted the name Charles Nestle. He married a colleague from the Paris salon, opened his own hairdressing salon in London and gave public lectures to promote his hair-waving technique.
The so-called ‘Marcel’ wave was done by using heated tongs on the client's hair. Nestle found out that by dampening the hair before using tongs, the wave lasted longer. Next he found that coating the hair with a paste of borax, deposits of which had been discovered in California by <used borax discovered by> Winters*, made the process work even better.
The first year Nestle had only eighteen customers, not surprising since the process took twelve hours, was very expensive and did not always work. Around 1909 he began using electric instead of gas heaters, and also invented piece of curling apparatus that reduced the time of the process. It took time to convince customers to trust his new technique and in the meantime Nestle made and sold false eyelashes and eyebrows.
In 1912 a souvenir programme for Sarah <had ad in program of> Bernhardt* at the London Coliseum carried an advertisement for the Nestle permanent wave, claiming that he now had more than 5,400 customers.
When Word War I broke out in 1914, Nestle, still a German citizen, was classed as an enemy alien. He moved to New York in 1915 where he found hairdressers using a version of his waving technique.
He opened his own salon in Manhattan and managed to show that he could give a 'permanent' wave which lasted longer than anybody else's. He founded the Nestle Company to make and distribute supplies for beauty and hairdressing salons, and by the time his family arrived in the United States in 1919 he had a factory on Long Island and a hairdressing salon on Fifth Avenue.
This time round, he was careful to get patents for the waving solutions, curling devices and hair-testing procedures he developed. He was now a prominent figure and in 1926 was appointed president of the Master Hair Dressers’ Association.
In 1927 he opened the largest beauty salon in the world on Broadway with clients including leading stage actresses and film stars. He wrote "The Story of Hair" published in 1928. Nestle's theory was that hair growth was related to nervous energy, that criminals had more hair than other members of society, and that people with thick hair were likely to be obese.
Nestle merged the company he had set up with the LeMur beauty supply firm
but lost much of his money. He worked on analysis and products for hair care until the end of his life.
ASSESSMENT: Made a significant a notable contribution to the huge hairdressing and beauty industry.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None
ONELINER: Charles Nestle, hairdresser inventor of permanent wave
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Durbin, Gail, Wig, Hairdressing and Shaving Bygones, Shire Publications Ltd., Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, 1984
Cox, James Stevens, An Illustrated Dictionary of Hairdressing and Wigmaking, B T Batsford Ltd., London, 1989
American Dictionary of Biography