Vintage Beauty Salons: 12 Hilarious Photos of the Early Hair Dryers From Between the 1920s and 1940s

   

Before the invention of hair dryers, women would often attach hoses to the exhaust ends of vacuum cleaners to blow-dry their hair.

 
A woman sits under a chrome-plated hair dryer, 1928. (Keystone-France/Getty Images)
 
c. 1928 (Corbis)

 

 
A stylist uses a freestanding dryer to blow dry a client's hair with controlled precision at the Hairdressing Fair of Fashion in London, 1929. (Puttnam /Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

 

 
1929 (Puttnam /Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

 

A woman tries a new hair drying machine at the Hairdressing Fashion Fair in London. Nov. 5, 1930. (Popperfoto/Getty Images)


 
1930 (Imagno/Austrian Archives/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

 

A woman demonstrates a hair-steaming apparatus at the Hairdressing Exhibition in London, 1930. (Imagno/Austrian Archives/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

 

A woman tries out a Supreme Pedestal hairdryer at the Hairdressing Exhibition in London. Sept. 22, 1932. (Miller/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

 

A hair salon in Moscow, Russia, 1933. (Emil Strassberg/Ullstein Bild/Getty Images)

 

A hair salon in Cannes, France, 1937. (Imagno/Austrian Archives/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

 

Marjorie McWeeney dries her hair with her son Mark at a hair dresser in New York, 1947. (Nina Leen/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

 

 
A woman uses a heat lamp and hairdryer made of hot glass, 1948. (Ralph Royle/Pix Inc./The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)