Entry · catalog no. 4224
press and curl
/ /ˌprɛs ən ˈkɜːrl/ /PRESS uhn KURL
noun · Black America — St. Louis, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and across the South · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
A two-part hairdressing service: the hair is washed, oiled with a pressing oil, and drawn straight root to tip with a heated metal comb, then shaped and set with a heated curling iron. For most of the twentieth century it was the ordinary way Black women and girls wore their hair out, and the appointment itself — every other Saturday, the same shop, the same beautician — was a fixture of Black community life.
“Mama sat me on a phone book by the stove every other Saturday for a press and curl.”
Origin & Attribution
Black beauty culture in the United States, built out from the turn of the twentieth century. Annie Turnbo Malone was selling scalp preparations by 1900, moved to St. Louis in 1902, and founded Poro, whose catalog sold pressing irons, curling irons, and a Marcel comb to her agents. Madam C. J. Walker began as one of Malone's Poro agents, started her own company in 1905, and opened Lelia College in Pittsburgh in 1908 to train hair culturists. Between them they turned pressing and curling into a paid trade and made the Black beauty shop a Black-owned institution and a political space. The persistent claim that Madam Walker invented the hot comb is false: heated straightening and curling irons were sold in American catalogs by the 1880s, before Walker was in business, and Walker's own biographer and great-great-granddaughter A'Lelia Bundles has publicly corrected the record. The credit belongs not to an invention but to the industry two Black women built around a tool neither of them made. The archive notes that the compound phrase itself cannot be dated to a specific first printing; 1928 dates the earliest documented procedure, not the earliest documented words.
1902
Annie Turnbo Malone moves to St. Louis and builds Poro around hair and scalp care, training agents nationwide
1908
Madam C. J. Walker opens Lelia College in Pittsburgh, training women as hair culturists
1928
The Text Book of the Madam C. J. Walker Schools of Beauty Culture prints the pressing and curling method for students
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black America — St. Louis, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and across the South · 1900s
Spoken by
Black beauticians and beauty school students, shop customers, and mothers and daughters at the kitchen stove
$PRESSAThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Falling98 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
85/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1928
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Atlanta, GA
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Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
Moriah James, "Sizzle: Annie Turnbo Malone, Madam C.J. Walker, and the Complicated History of the Hot Comb," National Museum of African American History and Culture, 10 January 2019
museum collection story
■
A'Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, Scribner, 2001
biography
■
"Madam C.J. Walker's Kin Sets Record Straight on Hot Comb," letter from A'Lelia Bundles, 8 April 2014
newspaper correction
■
+ Cite a sourceAyana Byrd and Lori Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, St. Martin's Press, 2001
book
See also