Mrs. Allen’s World Hair Restorer

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a balding head must be in want of a hair restorer. That is what Mrs. S.A. Allen (and plenty of other enterprising Victorians) counted upon when she introduced her modestly-named World’s Hair Restorer.

Hair Raising Stories notes that Susan A. Allen sold the hair restorer in the 1840s. A blurb entitled “Who is Mrs. S.A. Allen?” appears in some 1860s ads. It tells us that Mrs. Allen was a New Yorker who, sometime in the 1840s, “dislik[ed] the idea of going grey” but also distrusted dyes.

She therefore invented “something” that was not a dye, that restored color and moisture to hair. Naturally she had not intended to establish a business but was “forced to commence making it for sale,” because everyone she knew was clamoring for it. By the 1860s “she now probably does one of the largest cash businesses in the City of New York” and even had a depot in London. By the early 1860s, however, Selah R. Van Duzer was selling the Mrs. Allen hair products; he registered the name Mrs. S.A. Allen’s World Hair Restorer as a trademark in 1876 [Hair Raising Stories].

Mrs Allen also offered the public a “World’s Hair Dressing” with the wonderful name Zylobalsamum (sometimes these were sold as two products, sometimes as one and the same). Zylobalsamum was suitable for women and children as well as for balding men. Mark Twain named one of his characters Zylobalsamum, in The American Claimant (1899). Another character, on hearing this name, says “I never heard such a name. It sounds like a disease. Is it a disease?”

It wasn’t, but if you believed the ads, it could certainly cure several diseases and conditions.

Via Pinterest

Clergymen in particular appreciated Mrs. Allen’s  remedies, and their testimonials fill her ads. Reverend A. Webster of Boston wrote with succinct pleasure, in 1864, that “I am now neither bald nor grey.” Clergymen would be seen as reliable sources of information, easily believed in an ad. And they would very often be balding or greying, too. Perfect friends for Mrs. Allen. She gave discounts to them, too, and noted that her Principal Depot and Manufactory was at 355 Broome Street, New York “opposite Dr. Cone’s Church.”

Dr. Cone’s Church, at the corner of Broome and Elizabeth Streets, was also known as the First Baptist Church. His 1855 obituary in the New York Times tells us that he had had “a checkered career.” Born in 1780, Cone had been an actor when he was young, and then a bookkeeper for a newspaper in Baltimore. He then worked in the Treasury Department in Washington. Finally, he became a Baptist minister at age 34, in 1814. It is not known whether he ever used Mrs. Allen’s hair products, though.

In 1870 the Chicago Medical Journal (vol. 27, p. 474) reported that English chemist Henry Matthews had analyzed an 8 ounce bottle of the World’s Hair Restorer and found that it contained 75.6 grains of sulphur and 87 grains of acetate of lead – which would produce lead poisoning in a regular user and “in many instances has caused incurable paralysis” through absorption via the scalp, as well as the inhalation of fumes from the lotion. They also cited the case of a Dr. J. M. Witherwax from Davenport, Iowa who had been in the habit of dousing his hair and whiskers with “a popular hair restorer” over a long period of time, and died from lead poisoning that was most likely the result of this practice. Much better to be grey or bald.

In 1872, Benjamin Godfrey wrote in his Diseases of Hair that Mrs. Allen’s hair cure contained acetate of lead, sulphur and glycerine just like most other “common hair cosmetics of the present day.” These included Rossetter’s Hair Restorer, Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer and the literary-sounding Melmoth’s Oxford Hair Restorer – which were identical to Mrs. Allen’s. Oddly, Godfrey did not think that putting lead on your hair was a bad thing, because (he said) there wasn’t very much lead in any of them.

As late as 1915 you could purchase Mrs. S.A. Allen’s World’s Hair Color Restorer  for a dollar a bottle from her depot at 55 Barclay Street, New York City.

Barbo Compound

Barbo Compound was made by the Barbo Manufacturing Co. in New York City and was sold until at least 1955. The ad pictured above dates from 1917.

A 1942 report by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station [link] describes Barbo Compound as a “pale yellow powder slightly acid to litmus” which is slightly alarming. Even more alarming: this statement in 1919 in the Michigan Food and Drug Monthly calling Barbo “poisonous” – it was roughly 1/3 lead acetate. “Little wonder…that in their circular they state specifically that they ‘assume no liability for the results of its use by anyone.”