Excerpt: 'Plastic: A Toxic Love Story'

If you go on Ebay, that virtual souk of human desire, you'll find a small but dedicated trade in antique combs.

Trawling the site on various occasions, I've seen dozens of combs made of the early plastic called celluloid — combs so beautiful they belonged in a museum, so beguiling I coveted them for my own. I've seen combs that looked as if they were carved from ivory or amber, and some that were flecked with mica so they shone as if made of hammered gold. I've seen huge, lacy decorative combs of faux tortoiseshell that might have crowned the piled-high up-twist of a Gilded Age debu­tante, and tiara-like combs twinkling with sapphire or emerald or jet "brilliants," as rhinestones once were called. One of my favorites was a delicate 1925 art deco comb with a curved handle and its own carry­ing case; together, they looked like an elegant purse made of tortoise­shell and secured with a rhinestone clasp. Just four inches long, it was surely designed for the short hair of a Jazz Age beauty. Looking at the comb, I could imagine its first owner, a bright spirit in a dropped-waist dress and Louise Brooks bob, reveling in her liberation from corsets, long gowns, and heavy hair buns.

Surprisingly, these gorgeous antiques are quite affordable. Cellu­loid plastic made it possible, for the first time, to produce combs in real abundance — keeping prices low even for today's collector who doesn't have a lot to spend but wants to own something fabulous. For people at the dawn of the plastic age, celluloid offered what one writer called "a forgery of many of the necessities and luxuries of civilized life," a foretoken of the new material culture's aesthetic and abundance.

Combs are one of our oldest tools, used by humans across cultures and ages for decoration, detangling, and delousing. They derive from the most fundamental human tool of all — the hand. And from the time that humans began using combs instead of their fingers, comb design has scarcely changed, prompting the satirical paper the Onion to publish a piece titled "Comb Technology: Why Is It So Far Behind the Razor and Toothbrush Fields?" The Stone Age craftsman who made the oldest known comb — a small four-toothed number carved from animal bone some eight thousand years ago — would have no trouble knowing what to do with the bright blue plastic version sit­ting on my bathroom counter.

For most of history, combs were made of almost any material hu­mans had at hand, including bone, tortoiseshell, ivory, rubber, iron, tin, gold, silver, lead, reeds, wood, glass, porcelain, papier-mâché. But in the late nineteenth century, that panoply of possibilities began to fall away with the arrival of a totally new kind of material — celluloid, the first man-made plastic. Combs were among the first and most popular objects made of celluloid. And having crossed that material Rubicon, comb makers never went back. Ever since, combs generally have been made of one kind of plastic or another.

The story of the humble comb's makeover is part of the much larger story of how we ourselves have been transformed by plastics. Plastics freed us from the confines of the natural world, from the material constraints and limited supplies that had long bounded hu­man activity. That new elasticity unfixed social boundaries as well. The arrival of these malleable and versatile materials gave producers the ability to create a treasure trove of new products while expand­ing opportunities for people of modest means to become consumers.

Reprinted with permission from Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, by Susan Freinkel, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright 2011 Susan Freinkel. All rights reserved.

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