Marjorie Joyner
Source: iOneDigital / HelloBeautiful
Karl Nesser may have invented the long-term perm in 1905, but it was Marjorie Joyner, one of Walker’s mentees and the first black woman to graduate from a renowned Chicago college of “beauty culture,” who created the permanent wave designer machine without the use of chemical process. Joyner realized she could heat and bend hair bonds from the inside out while looking at the rod inside of her pot roast. She was given the first patent for a permanent wave machine in 1928. She went on to draft some of the first state cosmetology laws in Illinois with political activist Mary Bethune in 1954.
