Welcome to the Beauty Bubble everyone!
This is my salon and museum of hair and beauty in downtown Joshua Tree, California.
I've been collecting these things for 30 years.
I was a history lover that became a hairdresser when I was a teenager.
So I've been doing it since 1991, um doing hair and collecting the whole time.
Now they call me "America's Hairstorian!"
If you take a look around, you'll see there's stuff in every nook and cranny here in the shop.
So it's become a bit of a roadside attraction.
Her name is Rose.
Is she here for a hair appointment?
Rose just recently got a makeover. She's wearing this 80's hairdresser dress.
But no, she's working out on the vibrator belt.
That mid-century fitness. All you had to do was work that jiggle!
And then go and sit in a personal sauna and sweat for a little bit.
[Jingling Music with Hot Steamy Sauna Sounds!]
That's all you had to do!
That does not sound like a big workout to me. [Laughter]
I call this room the Lustre Creme Lounge because this is where a lot of the Lustre Creme shampoo ads are.
The Lustre Creme shampoo is a popular shampoo in the '40s and '50s
And most of the big celebrities of the day did the advertisements.
So that's where that name comes from.
And then there's a lot of hair and beauty related dolls and toys and novelty items in this room.
It started out as like buying old hairdryers and products.
And then it kind of turned into buying anything that was hair and beauty related,
including like the "Hair Bear Bunch" lunch box.
So what was the first item you ever collected?
The first piece in the collection is this hair dryer here on the rotating platform.
I have it marked, the "first piece in the collection."
This is a 1940s Le John hair dryer,
and that was a gift from my friend, Pamela, when I started beauty school in 1991.
Her and I were thrift shop buddies.
So she knew what I liked, and she bought me that hair dryer.
And that's what started the whole thing.
So I've just been collecting ever since.
This is a Duart perm machine from the 1930s.
This is what you would have used to process the early perms of the 20th century.
Those little clamps actually just heated up and that's what would process the chemicals.
The cold wave was invented in the 1950s, and so that's when Toni introduced the first home perm.
And that changed the beauty business because it didn't require the use of the cumbersome machines anymore.
So these were used like late 1890s is when the very first perm machine was invented.
And cow urine was used in the original perm solution.
Is that why they have the test curl button back there?
Yeah, and then these were very expensive too. It was like a dollar a curl.
You know, so for back in the day that was real expensive and they were very time consuming.
And how many curls can you get out of that machine?
There's probably about a hundred clamps on there. Maybe fifty clamps on there.
Wow, a $50 perm right there!
Then here's some of the perms from the '80s. Of course we know that the perms were really popular in the '80s.
They've yet to make a comeback quite as big as they were in the '80s.
Do you think that will ever happen or is it just too much?
It could, I won't be doing them though. I do not like doing perms!
I tell people I am allergic in fact!
[Laughter]
So tell me a little bit about the hair dryers and things you have.
These are hair dryers from the 1960s. They still work.
We use these more so to process hair color now more than a roller set,
but we do get the occasional request for a roller set.
This is an interesting contraption, I love this.
This thing is called The Pin Whiz,
and this is a Bobby Pin stapler from the 1940s.
So you'd fill this with bobby pins and it's got a little trigger. You pull back the trigger and then you push out a bobby pin into your pinned curl.
And hopefully not into your head.
What about all the pictures and things you got up here?
Yeah, everything's hair and beauty related. So there are records.
There's old products. There's lots of hair net packages.
I love the graphics and the images on the old packaging.
Things were a lot more interesting back in the day.
An interesting fact about a lot of the hair nets is they were made from human hair.
A lot of them were handmade in fact.
Handmade from human hair.
So somebody probably made like 10 cents an hour weaving hair nets from human hair. Can you imagine?
That would not be a job i'd like to do.
But here's one of my sculptures. So I actually made a series of hairdo sculptures.
I call these the "hair-sterical gals," and this is The Mohawk.
They are hairdos that are made out of hair things.
So for years and years, people have been donating their old rollers and clips and combs and barrettes.
You name it. They've been donating that stuff to my collection and I call it beauty waste.
So for years i've just been accumulating all these things,
and I finally decided to pull it all out. I dumped it in the middle of the room.
And I had a mountain of plastic and metal stuff. Beauty waste.
So my first instinct was to separate it all by color.
I ultimately came up with eight hairdo sculptures, and six of them are currently on display in the San Francisco Airport.
So approximately how many items do you have in your collection?
There's approximately 3 000 pieces,
and probably even more at this point.
You know there are pieces that are in the SFO exhibit, so everything's not even here at this point.
There's so many hair dryers.
I probably have the world's largest collection of hairdryers at this point.
I've filled every nook and cranny of this space.
This was an old apartment that was built in the '40s.
So this is an apartment complex built in the '40s.
My favorite thing in here is the nude Marilyn. I don't know if you can show that,
but there's the classic nude Marilyn Monroe photograph.
A lot of barbershop stuff in here.
The shaving brushes, Old Spice stuff.
Here's an old bottle of multi-vitamins.
Masculine hair groom.
You know it was just something that, I was 19 years old, I loved history.
I ended up in beauty school just kind of on a whim because I qualified for grants that paid for the entire education.
When I was a kid, I thought I'd be an archaeologist,
but instead I'm a "hairstorian." Now they call me "America's Hairstorian."
As far as I was concerned, it was a fascinating history that was being discarded.
Because all of this stuff is really stuff that would have just been thrown out.
And so when I started collecting in 1991, the internet didn't exist so you couldn't Google a beauty museum.
I had just never heard of one, so and I was then twenty thinking, "Well, I'm going to build a beauty museum."
And so here I am living that dream.
Roadside attraction beauty parlor museum on Route 62 here in Joshua Tree, California.
So what do you think is the most fun part of this this little museum slash salon?
I think it's the nostalgia,
and then everybody who comes in here says,
"Oh, it reminds me of my grandmother or this reminds me of my mother."
Everybody's got a memory attached to something in here it seems like.
And people are just getting the biggest kick out of it.
It's an interesting, it's a cultural history.
I feel like everybody can relate to the things in here because everybody's had hair or has hair.
Everybody's been to a salon or barbershop.
You know, they remember these things from their grandmother's bathroom.
Do you think that say a barbershop or a salon is something that gets overlooked in the whole kind of like preservation?
Absolutely, there's only a couple other collectors that I know of who who are collecting stuff like that.
I probably have the largest collection of this kind now, and that's been documented quite a bit.
But yeah, this was just stuff that got thrown out.
I mean, if you got a new hair dryer, you'd throw out the old one.
You know, or if you didn't use all of the shampoo you know you'd pitch it.
Or if my grandma passed away and you went to clean out her bathroom, more than likely all that stuff would just get thrown out.
So it was things that I was saving from the landfills if you will.
[Jingle] Come on down to the Beauty Bubble, you must get there on the double.
[Jingle] If you're having beauty trouble come to the Beauty Bubble.
[Jingle] Look for the bubbles on 62.
[Jingle] There's a museum and a gift shop too.
[Jingle] Come on in or give us a call: three - six - six, nine thousand.