The Quack Doctor

Australian Women’s Weekly, 17 Jan 1962

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Although I focus on medical advertising here at The Quack Doctor, I do like to feature the occasional beauty product when it catches my eye. I stumbled on this mid-20th-century Australian hair lotion while failing to find something else I was looking for.

Curlypet’s heyday was the 1930s to the 1960s, though it was still around until at least the early 70s. It was sometimes advertised as a setting lotion for ladies hairstyles, but what makes it unusual is that its main targets were children – or rather, their mothers. The advertising set out to persuade mothers that they wanted a curly-haired cherub who would take first prize in baby shows and go on to possess advantages over its straight-haired friends.

My mum remembers having foul-smelling Tweeny Twink perms inflicted upon her in the 1950s by my grandma (I don’t recommend googling Tweeny Twink, by the way), so I wondered if this was something similar, but it appears to have required a lot more perseverance. Six to nine months of use should start to create a permanent change in the way the hair grew.

Curlypet arrived in concentrated form in a tube, and one had to dilute it before rubbing the solution through baby’s straight locks. Unlike with modern hair products, the advertising didn’t go overboard on pseudoscientific claims – but they do creep in occasionally:

[The hair's] curliness then is due to a different and looser construction of the cells in the hair shaft itself. The Curlypet treatment has been perfected by scientific investigators to influence the growth of hair in this way by a process which they know as “osmosis.”

Early Curlypet ads attribute the fashion for curls to the impressive heads of hair sported by Princess Elizabeth and her sister Margaret Rose. One advertorial-style feature presented this before and after picture of young Master Duncan, who appears to have been transformed from a cute little chap into something akin to Beelzebub.

Curlypet created a need by presenting an assumption that the curly-headed child was the epitome of perfection and that mothers would – indeed, should – be unhappy with anything else. In one 1935 testimonial, Mrs. M H. practically signs up her kid for a lifetime of therapy when she announces:

Much to my disappointment, my baby girl was born with straight hair. I used to try and coax it to curl by setting it every day with warm water, but it still remained straight.

Mrs M. H.’s disappointment turn into envy when a friend from Melbourne came over with a beautiful curly-haired four-year-old in tow, but the friend imparted the secret – Curlypet – and little Joan H. soon acquired both a mass of golden ringlets and her mother’s acceptance.

Ambitious parents could even dream of stardom for their Curlypetted young – such children were supposedly in demand in the movie business. According to the product’s promoters, ‘languishing heart-throbbers of eighteen-inch cigarette holders and two-inch eyelashes’ were going out of style, to be replaced in the public’s imagination by ‘something new in the shape of one or two super children’ with ‘the loveliest curly heads of hair.‘

Even at a more local level, Curlypet might increase the tot’s chances of winning prizes, like little Baby Drummond here, who carried off the trophy in the Open Championship at Sydney Baby Show. This ad is from 1938 but Baby Drummond’s example was still being used in 1947, by which time it must have got pretty embarrassing for him (if he were a real person, that is).

Do any of my readers from Australia or New Zealand remember Curlypet? Were you doused in it in your youth and did you end up with a crop of beautiful curls? Are you Baby Drummond or Master Duncan? I would love to hear any reminiscences!

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The pictures in this post are from the wonderful site Australia Trove.

NOSE MACHINE.—This is a simple successful contrivance which, applied to the nose for an hour daily, so directs the soft cartilage of which the member consists, that an ill-formed nose is quickly shaped to perfection. Any one can use them, and without pain. Price 10s. 6d., sent carriage free.—ALEX. ROSS, 248 High Holborn, London. Pamphlet sent for two stamps.

Source: The Examiner (London) 10 Feb 1872

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This intriguing contraption arrived on the scene in late 1871. Alexander Ross was a perfumer who branched out into a wide range of beauty products, including depilatories, hair curling fluid, complexion pills and skin tightening lotion, but was perhaps best known for his Spanish Fly hair restorer. On the launch of the nose machine, I suspect he sent out a pamphlet to the press. The novelty certainly attracted plenty of tongue-in-cheek comment.

The Birmingham Daily Post joked that the machine could provide political conspirators with the means of becoming masters of disguise. Once the device was well-known, they predicted,

…we shall expect to have fashions in noses as well as in hair. Where will it stop? Who knows?

The Pall Mall Gazette also wondered where the quest for perfection would end. With noses sorted out, would fashion next turn its attention to the eyes?

The substitution of coloured glass (of the hue best suited to the complexion of the wearer) for these organs is probably merely a question of time, and awaits only the solution of a few optical difficulties involved in the change. When this final conquest has been achieved, we shall at last be able to walk abroad with the proud consciousness that we owe our personal attractions not to the blind bounty of nature but to our own good taste and decorative skill.

News of the invention immediately reached the US too, with one Pennsylvania paper commenting:

Now let this genius invent a “nose machine” that will prevent persons from sticking their noses into other people’s business, and his fortune is guaranteed.

All good fun, but Punch ran a rather more sinister joke suggesting that Jewish people converting to Christianity could have their noses converted too.

Ross was a prolific advertiser, but the adverts themselves remained brief and low-key, without any typographical virtuosity, and often the nose machine was only mentioned as part of a list of his other products. It doesn’t appear to have gained much credence, remaining a last resort for the nasally challenged and an entertaining curiosity to others. In the mid-1890s, the Hampshire Chronicle remarked on it as if it had just been invented, giving a description as follows:

It is nothing but a little wooden clamp, consisting of two thin boomerang-shaped bits of boxwood, measuring about 3in, by ½in. and held together by two fly-headed screws. The nose is put in the clamp, tilted or hooked to the requisite form, and then the screws are tightened… …The whole apparatus could easily be turned out wholesale for threepence or less.

By this time Ross Jnr. had also come up with a similar contrivance for changing the shape of the chin, and one for correcting sticking-out ears. In the early 20th century the idea took off to a greater extent, with new versions being produced, such as this one from US inventor Ignatius Nathaniel Soares (please note this is a 1905 invention, and not what Alexander Ross’s machine would have looked like):

A lot of the remedies I feature on The Quack Doctor are mildly amusing. I know some people link to them as examples of what our credulous old-timey forefathers would believe in. But this one, like the majority of stuff on the site, has a modern equivalent (thanks to Gizmodo for the link), not to mention the widespread availability of rhinoplasty. People’s desire to improve their appearance is timeless.