Pétrole Hahn Hair Tonic

Pétrole Hahn hair tonic was sold beginning in 1885.

Here are some of their art deco and other vintage print ads.

Pétrole Hahn advertisement, L’Illustration, February 9, 1918, page 2. Public domain image.

Pétrole Hahn advertisement, from Les Feuillets d'Art, 1920.

Pétrole Hahn advertisement, pochoir from Les Feuillets d'Art, 1920.

Pétrole Hahn advertisement, “arrête la chute des cheveux,” illustration by Charles Martin, unknown date.
 

Pétrole Hahn advertisement, L’Illustration, December 6, 1930.

Pétrole Hahn advertisement, designed by Andre Wilquin, circa 1930.

Ellen Auerbach, Grete Stern, Studio Ringl & Pit, Pétrole Hahn, 1931.
Collection SFMOMA. © Ringl & Pit, courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. (1)

 Dora Maar and Pierre Kefer, "Étude publicitaire pour Pétrole Hahn." Original silver gelatin glass negative plate.
Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1934. (2)

 Dora Maar, ferrotyped, 1935. (3)

1. The Jewish Women's Archive interviewed the photographers Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern about their image which was used as an ad for Pétrole Hahn hair lotion. It combined a nightgown, mannequin head, and a real hand, but the photographers later forgot whose hand was in the photo and which one took the photograph.

2. Dora Maar's surrealist advertising work in the early 1930s, included this image of a boat sailing through an ocean of hair.
3. www.mutualart.com

Comer Cottrell & the Do-it-yourself Jheri Curl

Earlier this month Comer Coltrell passed away. His legacy? Creating the Curly Kit, a do-it-yourself Jheri curl kit.

The Jheri curl, a permanent for African-American hair developed by the hairdresser and chemist Jheri Redding, was at the height of its popularity in the late 1970s, but it required spending tons of money going to the hair salon, buying the moisturizing products, and getting touch-ups. At $8 a box, the Curly Kit was a winner. Forbes magazine in 1981 called the Curly Kit “the biggest single product ever to hit the black cosmetics market.”

Comer Cottrell started Pro-Line Corporation in 1970 but it didn't find success until his 1980 over-the-counter product hit the market. “We looked at the curl process,” Cottrell told the Dallas Observer in 1996, “and saw it really was a simple process and people could do it themselves. It was no secret.”

Comer Cottrell, right, confers with adman Jerry Metcalf in 1977.  Los Angeles Times 

But like so many fashion trends, the success of the Jheri curl (and its derivatives) would not endure. By the mid-1980s, amidst complaints of it staining clothing and furniture and rumors that it caused Michael Jackson's hair to catch on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in 1984, it became easy fodder for jokes and comedians.

Comer Cottrell passed on October 3rd.

For related reading, check out Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America by Ayana Byrd and Lori L. Tharps.

---

Bonus: Michael Jackson getting his hair styled for the cover of Thriller (1982).

Brooklyn Beach Hair

Brooklyn beaches are so cool that your hair even knows your not in Long Island, the Jersey Shore, Florida, or California anymore.

"Natural sea salt gives you volume, and a dose of jojoba oil keeps the salt from being overly drying."

It's certainly not the ingredients that give this hair tonic its Brooklyn flavor, but that isn't going to stop some marketer from promoting Brooklyn Beach Hair as an obtainable look. There is a feeding frenzy over Brooklyn's cool factor right now. According to the New York Daily News, Brooklyn has become one of the nation's 30 most popular girls' names, moving from #912 in the nation to #28 in 2013. Of course of the 41 states where Brooklyn is now the most popular girl's name beginning with B, New York is not among them. We know what's up. Our garbage still stinks.

Beauty, Virtue and Vice

Beauty, Virtue and Vice: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century Prints is an amazingly extensive online exhibition of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Massachusetts). It covers topics such as "Ideal Beauty," "Women as Objects of Beauty and Desire," "Variations on the Beauty Standard" and "Women in Public Life." It is the section on "Images of Women at Advertising Strategies" that shows the role of hair in the construction of beauty that you may find of interest.

While the exhibition points out that most prints "were designed simply to please the eye... they are also useful to historians who would like to understand how nineteenth-century Americans thought about the world in which they lived. Although prints are often works of imagination (even when they are grounded in fact), they still have much to tell us about the time and place in which they were created."

Trade cards and print ads were a popular mode of advertising in the nineteenth-century, particularly after the Civil War. Appealing images were used to associate beauty and leisure activities with a variety of products, from soap to cigars. In the two cases below, you'll see to what lengths illustrators went to promote (the already) popular hair tonics. Seeing the richness of this topic, I'm sorry I didn't address it in the exhibition I put together for The Museum at FIT, The Artful Line: Drawings and Prints from FIT's Special Collections of the Gladys Marcus Library.

 Lyon's Katharion. Sarony & Co., 1856.

"Although this advertisement promotes the retail business of Heath, Wynkoop, & Co., the proprietors use the appeal of a popular restorative hair tonic, Lyon’s Katharion, to attract the attention of potential customers. Katharion (from the Greek word for “pure”) was a generic name for tonics that counted castor oil, tincture of cantharides, alcohol, and fragrance oils among their ingredients. This advertising image says little about what the product actually does, but uses the powerful visual language of artistic fancy to associate itself and Lyon’s Katharion with romance, luxury, and beauty. 

The setting is highly theatrical. The lush-tressed young woman admires herself in a large gilt mirror (itself a very expensive luxury item) as she leans casually upon a bureau dripping with jewels. The enclosure that frames her seems like a fancifully decorated vending booth, and the architectural details at far left and right suggest that all of this is set within a grand European palace. Visual pleasures include gilt architectural embellishments, flowers bursting in bloom, lively sculptural carvings, and silky fabrics. These many symbols represent a variety of sensual comforts, and are meant to stimulate a viewer’s desire. This beautifully colored print represents a mighty promise from a little bottle of hair tonic."

Hall's Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer. Attributed to Louis Maurer, n.d.

 "Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer was another popular brand of hair tonic, and as with the previous print, this one, too, capitalizes on the popularity of these name brands to advertise a retail business.  This print is, in many ways, similar to the previous print advertising Lyon’s Katharion, particularly in its representation of beauty and comfort within a luxurious setting. The scenario here is a domestic one, and the young beauty with the endless tresses is being tended to by an equally beautiful, expensively dressed handmaid. All of the furnishings, and the dress of both women signal wealth and luxurious comfort. Louis Maurer, the presumed creator of this print, was an exceptionally successful American lithographer who worked for a number of major American art print publishers."

A Tale of Long, Long Hair

Miss Grace Sutherland, ca. 1890, albumen print, George Eastman House Collection

It is generally agreed that women’s hair is a symbol of sexual power, seduction, and eroticism. Was it not the luxuriant long hair of Medusa that threatened the goddess Minerva’s own claim to be most beautiful? When contrasted to being tied-up atop the head, long hair signifies being sexually ready, as the time to go to bed.

The more abundant the hair, the more potent the sexual invitation implied by its display, for folk, literary, and psychoanalytic traditions agree that the luxuriance of the hair is an index of vigorous sexuality, even of wantonness. ~ Elisabeth G. Gitter, The Power of Women's Hair in the Victorian Imagination. 

The spectacle of hair that is the Sutherland Sisters' was, and continues to be, hard to ignore.
I first learned about the Seven Sutherland Sisters at the 2008 Whitney Biennial where the video installation piece Cheese by Argentinean artist Mika Rottenberg was on view. Ms. Rottenberg alludes to the Sutherland Sisters in her work which consists of a dilapidated, wooden barn-like structure with video monitors visible amidst its architecture. The monitors display longhaired “maidens” in white nightgowns “working” on a farm. Their seductive hair is a natural gift yet also the cause of their labor. The women are objects of desire and exploitation, their hair a product to be consumed both visually and materially.

This wonderful artwork simultaneously suggests grooming, farming, production, fairy tales, and carnival sideshows. The women’s toil is an amusing and sinister mixture of an elaborate hygiene ritual, magic ritual and seduction ritual as they “milk” their locks and the goats they live with to generate cheese.

In one sense, this piece refers to Marxist ideas. Rottenberg has said she was thinking about “this creepy idea of the body as this land, or this territory, and growing stuff of the body and extracting value from nature and this idea of labor as a process between a person and nature, making this kind of product.”

In another sense, however, this piece is more magical. One thinks of the fairy tale Rapunzel, of a woman whose freedom is gained through her hair, by her body. Rottenberg investigates feminine magic as related to Mother Nature, “the ability to ‘grow things out of the body’ as she says, as the ultimate, wondrous physical mystery.” 1.

The women represented in Ms. Rothenburg’s video were based on the Seven Sutherland Sisters of Cambria, New York (Niagara County). During the late 1800's and early 20th century the sisters were an illustrious singing act with the Barnum & Bailey Circus (c. 1892-1907).  However, the Sutherland Sisters were likely known more for their exceptionally long hair than for their musical talents. They would notoriously end their performance by letting down their hair to thunderous applause. It is said that the collective length of the sisters’ hair measured 37 feet!

Having garnered a modicum of fame, their father, Fletcher Sutherland, developed “The Seven Sutherland Sisters Hair Grower,” a mixture of alcohol, vegetable oils, and water. Having an intuitive sense for marketing, Mr. Sutherland sent the Hair Grower to a chemist for endorsement, receiving the following testimonial:

Cincinnati, Ohio, March, 1884: - Having made a Chemical Analysis of the Hair Grower prepared by the Seven Long Haired Sisters, I hereby certify that I found it free from all injurious substances. It is beyond question the best preparation for the hair ever made and I cheerfully endorse it. -- J.R. Duff, M.D., Chemist.

In its first year, the Hair Grower made the family $90,000 (as it was likely most popular with balding men!). They followed it shortly thereafter with a Scalp Cleaner and Hair Colorator. These hair products eventually made the family wealthy but their lavish spending and the vogue for the bob after World War I would leave the family penniless.

The curiosity of the Sutherland Sisters’ hair has inspired other artists besides Mika Rothenberg. Alyson Pou developed a performance/installation called A Slight Headache, a work presented in the manner of a 19th century dime museum/sideshow at the South Street Seaport Museum.

Replicating a carnival sideshow, an introductory gallery displayed freaks-of-nature / wonders-of-the-world in glass bell jars. Specimens such as the bearded piranha and the mummified alligator were presented in good humor to prepare you for the forthcoming performance, which itself revolved around a mother and daughter connected supernaturally by their exceptionally long hair.

A Slight Headache and Cheese both use the device of freakishly long hair to elicit connotations of the erotic and the strange as they relate to a bygone era. However, the fascination with women who have exceptionally long hair did not end with the PT Barnum act of the Sutherland Sisters. Today the internet brandishes a trove of sites featuring women with floor-length tresses. Woman’s long hair has been (and still is) seen as a source of beauty and temptation.

http://www.amazing-hair.de/
http://www.longhairyo.com/
http://www.longhairfoto.de/frame.htm
http://www.tlhp.de/links.htm