Antique Frederics Method Etched Glass Measure 💇 1920s Hair Perm Permanent Wave Beauty Salon Footed Graduate With Pour Spout

💇 What Was This Etched Glass For? Measuring Out Hair Perms, Then Called Permanent Waves, in a 1920s Beauty Parlor

Size: 4 1/4" x 2 1/8" ~ One of one, exactly as shown.

At first glance you'd swear this came off a druggist's shelf. It has the look: a small glass measure on a round foot, with a flared rim, a pinched pour spout and etched lines numbered up to 10. Then you turn it and read the script across the top, and it says Frederics Method. That's a 1920s beauty parlor name, and a big one.

Frederics was in the hair business. Back in the 1920s a perm still went by its full name, the permanent wave, and Frederics was one of the companies that gave women theirs. This little glass was for measuring out the liquid that went on the hair.

✂️ One of the Three Pioneers of the Perm

When the Society of Cosmetic Chemists, the scientists who develop beauty products, heard a paper on the chemistry of permanent waving in New York in May 1947, the speaker named the three accepted pioneers of the trade: Charles Nessler, E. Frederics and Eugene Surer. All three were working separately in London right after the turn of the century, and Nessler and Frederics both came to America around the time of World War I.

A family historian has traced the man as Ernest Otto Frederics, born July 25, 1884, from Kalthof-Iserlohn in Germany, and writes that his original surname was Speikerman. He married Gertrude Hathaway in Manhattan in August 1917, became a citizen in January 1921, and is credited with 29 patents. And yes, it's Frederics with an S, never Frederick.

🧪 Why a Beauty Shop Needed a Measuring Glass

Getting a perm back then meant chemicals and heat, and plenty of both. The hair was wet down with a waving liquid and then heated, often by a machine that hung cords and clamps over the customer's head. The early liquids were borax and water, and around 1924 ammonia (ammonium hydroxide) came into use alongside the borax, according to that same 1947 paper. Fine hair and coarse hair took different strengths, so whoever was giving the perm had to know exactly how much was going in. That's this glass's whole job, with the company's name right on it.

💄 A Name on Everything

Frederics wanted customers asking for it by name. A 1929 movie magazine ad from E. Frederics, Inc., at 235-247 East 45th Street in New York, talked up its trained Frederics operators, which is what they called the hairdressers, and told women to look for the name on the paper wrapper used on each lock of hair. Local shops traded on it too. The Combs Beauty Shop at 123 Market Street in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania put The Frederics Method right on the front of its brochure. The machines themselves are museum pieces now, with Frederics examples at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Hennepin History Museum in Minneapolis.

📰 And a Scandal to Go With It

The Frederics name made the papers for other reasons too. The story goes that after a very public divorce, Gertrude was wrongly shut away in an asylum in a scheme to get at her trust fund and push her out of the company, and that it took a state Supreme Court to sort it out. One headline of the day ran "Ducks Asylum, Asks Who's Looney Now."

🏠 Where It Belongs

Frederics paper still turns up, matchbooks and magazine ads mostly. The everyday tools from the back of the shop are a lot harder to come by, and this little glass is one of them. It'll look right at home on a vanity, in a cabinet of old pharmacy glass, or with any hairdresser who appreciates where the trade came from. There's only this one.