Smoking makes your skin finely textured.

The copy in this ad reads like a textbook of marketing bullshit. "This man thinks for himself. Knows the difference between fact and fancy. Trusts judgement, not opinion. Such a man usually smokes VICEROY. His reason? Best in the world. He knows that only VICEROY has a thinking man's filter and a smoking man's taste."

It's hard to string together forty-six words that have absolutely no meaning and contain no real information, but Brown and Williamson found a way.

Anyway, check out that painting. Holy jeez! Somebody got paid an awful lot of money to spend an awful lot of time painting an awfully good painting of a guy smoking. Sure, it was doubtlessly heavily photo-referenced, with a model hired, posed, and professionally shot. But even with really good reference, turninout a painting like this takes some serious skill. Let's go in closer, to see what I mean.

We know now that smoking is bad for you in lots of ways, yeah yeah. One of those ways is that, over the years, it makes your skin more, uuh, "detailed". I doubt that a modern cigarette ad would have gone with a painting exactly like this one in which the man's face looks like the skin of an orange, nomatter how true the painting is to the actual model's skin. Today, they'd probably smoothify and idealize the guy's face until he looked like an eight-year-old girl enjoying a smooth, mild Viceroy.

ANYway... painting skin texture this realistically is impressive. Let us bear in mind that, in 1959, there were no shortcuts - just brushes and paints. So, all this orange-peely detail was rendered by hand by a really good artist. Adding this level of detail to a person's skin is a delicate balancing act. Too much and your guy looks like a troll. To little and he looks like an ugly woman in a man's shirt. Pity the painting is uncredited. I was keen to find out this person's name and see what else he/she had done.

Apparently, this man is a scientist. See all the zappy shit flying around in the air behind him? That's science. Or, at least that was people's idea of science in 1959. More commonly, a bunch of electricity waving around loose in the air like that is indicative of science being mishandled, or being played with by hoons trying to impress a tour group. This guy is probably meant to be monitoring the Electricity Not Killing Everyone System, but instead, he's enjoying his "thinking man's filter". Also, he probably lit his Viceroy using the teslacoil, just to impress the tour. Good thinking, man.