Pipe cleaners as hair curlers
Pipe cleaners are well-known today for curling hair, but the name is a hangover from when genuine pipe cleaners for cleaning pipes were used as hair curlers. This page dips into more.
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By the webmaster based on the memoirs of FEC (1906-2002), discussions with older people and additional research
Original tobacconists' pipe cleaners
Although pipe cleaners are well-known today for craft, original pipe cleaners were sold by tobacconists for smokers to clean their pipes. Hence their name. They were of a non-descript pale colour, not the brightly ones seen today and were longer than today's craft type. They were designed to poke backwards and forwards through a pipe to brush out the stale tobacco and tar, and they were suitably long and flexible to reach round the bends in the pipe while retaining their stiffness. That's what makes them so good for curling hair.
Pipe cleaners, as sold by tobacconists, and used as hair curlers in the mid-20th Century
Why use pipe cleaners as hair curlers
These old-style pipe cleaners worked well as hair curlers because the outer surface was soft and fleecy while the wire inside was flexible yet strong enough to stay put however it was bent.
How pipe cleaners were used as hair curlers
Pipe cleaners were used to curl hair overnight. Making a curl was much as it is today: a strand of hair was wound round the pipe cleaner which was then wound back on itself to hold the curled hair in place. Small as the pipe cleaner curl was, it was still lumpy to sleep on. Just another example of use just at the ends of hair, resulting in the early-mid 20th Century hair fashion of hair being straight along its length and ending as a curl.
The type of curl produced with pipe cleaners
When the pipe cleaners were unwound in the mornings, the resulting curls were tighter than with the metal types but still fairly loose and natural looking. They gradually unwound themselves during the day.
The short life of a pipe cleaners as curlers
Pipe cleaners were not made to be twisted and untwisted tightly on a nightly basis, so they didn't last long as hair curlers. My mother visited the tobacconist frequently to buy them when I was taken shopping with her in the 1940s.
I think she was a little embarrassed going into a tobacconist which tended to be regarded as a male preserve - but she made sure that her husband's pipe was mentioned, even though he only ever smoked cigarettes.
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