Great Day Hair Color - Screw your secretary.

If your hair changes color from grey to black over a period of two weeks, nobody will notice except that they will all want to bang you. Who says? Clairol in 1971! Yep. This poor guy starts out looking as sad and floppy as Principal Skinner, but in a few undetectable weeks, he becomes as vibrant and desirable as Springfield's lesser-known co-anchor Scott Christian. And them his secretary will want to do him.

Things are getting hot in Mndotf Filing Inc., and Clairol's Great Day hair color is the reason. At first, the boss looked like he could be his secretary's father, but after a couple of sneaky weeks adding Great Day to his hair, why, he could pass for her brother, and that means it's open season on Boss Brotherdad! Someone's gonna get it on!

Boooo! The boss hardly gets a look from his much younger secretary. They're both completely distracted by doing their jobs. This is inappropriate.

After a couple of days, the secretary can't put her finger on it... or can she?

See? Before too long, his hair is looking like a big black dome full of masculinity and grooviness. She doesn't know why, but her desk is going to need straightening up, after they finish collating on it.

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COTY Sell-Arium - Requisit-t-t-t-t-tes!

So you're a pharmacist (or if you're English, a "chemist") in 1940, and you want to make use of your counter space. Who you gonna call? COTY, for their Sell-Arium, muddafugga! Time to sell some beauty requisit-t-t-t-t-tes! Oh, man, you got to get on that shit, stat!

Since you're probably pretty normal, you don't call the stuff in your medicine cabinet "requisites" (pronounced "rek-wuh-ZEET"). Despite being generally more pressed for time than every major civilization that came before us, we call that stuff "all the stuff in the medicine cabinet". Why? because we don't want to get made fun of for sounding all fancy, that's why.

But when you're COTY (pronounced "koh-TEE", and yes, I looked it up), nothing's too fancy for you. In fact, in the makeup-and-selling-grand-foofery-to-ladies biz, fancy is money in the bank. The harder to pronounce your name is, and the weirder your normal-word-replacements are, the happier you are. If you're a lady, you probably know this.

"A fishy requisit-t-t-t-t-te!"

Know who else knows this? Michael Palin as the Not At All Naughty Chemist. For a reason nobody knows, he always said "requisite" with too many T's throughout this whole sketch. I don't need to understand why to understand it's funny. Skip to 2:23 in the video below, or watch the whole thing from the Five-Frog-Curse cartoon, or just click this link that starts at the right tome code.

Guess what was really popular to rub on your face in 1940? Legionnaire's disease! See? Know you know. You're welcome!

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Palmolive Soap - Very old blue eyes.

Vaguely implied racism news now, from 1947, a time before white people had discovered other races!

Palmolive had their priorities straight. Lots of pictures of women. A bogus "study" funded by the manufacturer... if it ever happened at all. And, one man included in the ad, just to remind women that they craved male attention and approval. However, the guy, being  an anonymous male ideal, is shoved off the edge of the page, since he's just been hired as a symbol of masculinity.

The art in this as consists of retouched photographs (painting right over the top of a photo) and heavily referenced paintings (a painted copy of a photograph, maybe with some props and costume changes dreamed up by the artist). It's worth noting that either all the models hired by the art director were of a carefully selected genetic stock or their eyes were all corrected for "ideal blueness" by the artist, at the direction of the art director.

There's nothing overtly racist about this. It just reveals the prevailing ethnocentric ideal of a more ignorant time. It is also possible that the ad was tailored for McCall's magazine, which probably knew a lot about their readers. Since then, the pendulum has swung to the opposite end of the spectrum, with every ad featuring a happy family consisting of one white mom, one black dad, one Asian child, one Latino child, and an Eskimo. This is just as conspicuous and weird as our monochromatic Palmolive ad.

"There's nothing like the luxury of my new Ether-Soaked Rag."

Speaking of eyes, they're tricky, as we've mentioned before. Almost all of the eyes in this ad have come out of the painting process looking sane and normal, except for the leopard print lady, who is my favorite here, naturally. Her eyelids are way too droopy. She looks like she's selling horse tranquilizers, not soap.

Way at the bottom of the ad, there are even more paintings of serving suggestions of how you might enjoy Palmolive soap, just in case you forgot that you can use it to wash. These little paintings are printed at a size not quite supported by the dot pattern of the printing process. This is good news for us, because if you scan them and blow them up, their wonkiness is revealed for all to enjoy!

It must be bath night.

It's nice of Palmolive to let their customers know that it's perfectly safe to bathe with candy wax lips in your mouth.

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Little Ads - Secrets of beauty, wealth, and dolls.

A new cub reporter stationed in 1939 dropped these little ads on my desk this morning. They were originally published in Pictorial Review, a magazine targeted at housewives. It seems women are not to different from today. Their husbands don't let them control their own money, they seek secrets of eternal beauty, and they want to help ventriloquist dolls write poetry. Some things never change.

Secrets to beauty: 1) Smile 2) move the light from directly overhead to just behind the camera 3) don't be named "Eunice". I just saved you a dime. You're welcome.

You know how all husbands control the finances in the house and women wren't even allowed to see what money looks like? Me neither. I don't understand the headline of this ad. I do understand the appeal of stockings with a sofa in them. "Guaranteed hosiery... 9 months furnished." Where do I sign?

This ad isn't selling anything, and they're giving away Charlie McCarthy dolls to whoever sends in poetry suggestions for their limerick. It must be for a radio promotion or something. Or, more likely, once he had your address Charlie McCarthy would visit you in the night and murder the crap out of you. Everyone knows ventriloquist dummies are evil. My brother had one called "Willy Talk". His head was a three pound sphere of PVC that could knock out a pony if you got a good swing with it. If Charlie McCarthy is reciting poetry at me, I figure my number's up. He's not getting my address. He's freaking my shit right out.

 Or, more likely, once he had your address, Charlie McCarthy would visit you in the night and murder the crap out of you. Everyone knows ventriloquist dummies are evil. My brother had one called "Willy Talk". His head was a three pound sphere of PVC that could knock out a pony if you got in a good swing with it. If Charlie McCarthy is reciting poetry at me, I figure my number's up. He's not getting my address. He's freaking my shit right out. Jerry Seinfeld understands.

Jergens Lotion - Give him a handgasm.

Oh, 1947, you're killing me. Your idea of funny was Abbot and Costello, but everything else was so melodramatic. At least, everything in McCall's magazine was. Lots of ads had photos of embraces so overblown, it makes you wonder what the man's hand is doing, just out of shot.

This woman is getting a brain-boner, merely because her ear is in a man's mouth. I'm going to go out on a limb and call the expression on her face "suggestive". Either it's the guy eating out her ear, or something really great is happening in the baseball game she's got playing on the radio hidden in the napkin on her shoulder. Either way, SOMEone's going to third base. Heh heh heh. Nice one, Phil man.

Sure, it's a turn off when a woman has hands like a sleestak, but when I'm doing the "let me count the ways" dreamy enumeration of charms, her hands fall somewhere  halfway down the list. As long as there aren't huge doritos of hard, dead skin hanging off of them, and they're not Man Hands, they are generally a pass/fail sort of thing. "Hands? Check. And now to check for boobs!"

Sorry, Jergens of 1947. I guess I'm just not part of your demographic. To look at advertising is to know what advertisers think of their customers. Apparently, women of 1947 spent their entire day cleaning and thinking about relationships, and their heads were filled with girly dreams of being swept off their feet and provided for, happily ever after.

 If Jergens of 1947 were here, they'd probably give me a sock in the nose just for owning a copy of McCall's at all.

Let's see. How could Jergens advertise to men? Hmmmmm. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? I don't think anybody did what I'm thinking of in 1947. I tend to assume that the entirety of humanity was a virgin, and knew nothing about dirty stuff, until the sixties.

But the woman in this picture? She's definitely going to need to clean up after Waldo is done tasting her brain stem. The secrets in her brain  are going to force me to rethink my assumptions about pre-sixties dirtiness.

"I hope you like it, honey. I bought you Montana." They'll still argue about where to put the couch.

Day after glorious day they hiked. Do you like their hiking clothes? He's wearing his best hiking suit and she remembered to pack her Chanel hiking dress. In 1947, men wore top hats to bed and women wore ball gowns to make dinner. So, really, these two are dressed down. He may not even be wearing a tie! What if a squirrel sees? He had to bring her to Wyoming to explain how he feels about her hands. "Sweetheart, I love that your hands are really soft, like a tree. See? Trees." What's he going to do when he needs to explain that her faults are nearly undetectable, like neutrinos?

Ooo! Note to self: Get an intern to copyright the the word "Neutreen-o's". We'll just sell empty boxes and tell people they're full of cereal with an admittedly small but nonzero mass. It'd still be less of a scam than homeopathy, because technically speaking, there would be some actual neutrinos in the box at any given time. Proving that would be expensive, though.

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Jergens Lotion - Her hands were a religion.

Advertising has always been mostly lies and insult. But it's generally more subtle now, dare I say? (I just know someone will confront me with a hideous example proving I'm full of stupid). In 1938, maybe audiences were less cynical? Maybe they were more suggestible?

"A man worships soft young hands." We do? I mean, I'm turned off by a woman whose hands are horny and calloused like a steel worker's, but anything beyond a basic level of smoothness and being-smaller-than-mine-ness, I don't care what her hands are like.

We can't be too annoyed at the Jergens of 1938. Of course they had to build up the importance of routinely dipping your hands in a tub of lard to keep them from turning into lobster claws. But to say a man worships soft hands is, well, a fabrication. It's more true that women worship soft hands on other women. Likewise, many men dote upon their cars under the false pretense that it matters to women whether or not your tires are shiny enough. Beyond a basic level of not being rusty and not having a sea of hamburger wrappers in the back seat, many women won't be bothered much by the level of polish you put on your car. You may, however,  attract just the right guy if you Armor-All the door seals.

The picture is fantastic. She's not even looking at him. She can't be bothered. She's staring languidly across the room at a congealing pan of beef tallow, thinking that her skin could be a liiiiitle more moist, and wondering how it would feel to sweep her hands through it. Meanwhile, Ricky Ricardo (or at least the disembodied head of Ricky) is enraptured with her sumptuous finger pads, her succulent phalanges, her gorgeous knuckles and her savory cuticles. What? No tongue? Missed opportunity. I like that the woman with the twin torpedo tubes on her head could be flapping his lips with her fingers, making the "a-bubbudah-bubbaduh-blubbida" noise. She might as well. Nothing could stop Ricky from making some Jergens of his own with dreamy hands like hers to breathe on.

In the picture at the top, we see a sad little vignette. The two men are talking to the lady with (presumably) orgasmically moistened hands, while the troll with ordinary hands goes unnoticed.

Assuming that both women have identical personalities and appearances, I don't think it's the hands that forced the men's decision. Miss Leftlooks like she's wearing a satin smock, while Miss Right looks like she's ready to party.

Vaseline Hair Tonic - You seem to have some male in your hair.

Wet look. Dry look. They oscillate pretty regularly every few months. In 1967, the "wet look" was in, and Vaseline was there to help you with their hair tonic, which "Brings out the male in your hair... naturally". The bottle proclaims that "every drop fights dryness." Wow. Vaseline REALLY doesn't like the dry look. And why would they? Vaselines fortunes are built on products made from oil.

Are you the kind of man with male in your hair? Read this intense casino drama and find out. Click through the picture for increased bigness.

Would you have the moxie to spot the cheating dealer? Would you have the gumption to call him out in front of a crowd?

Would you have the maleness to save a young woman (who looks forty-six and is wearing my aunt's hair) from almost certain hornswagglery and make sexiness at her? Would you have the Vaseline to drag that crooked dealer into the foyer and rectally violate him with a hat rack? With Vaseline Hair Tonic in your hair, you're damn right you would.

But wait! What if the dealer also has Vaseline Hair Tonic maleness in his hair? He could make for one tough customer as well. His hair, while not as dreamfully laminated as the Hero's, is definitely not dry.

I dunno. He looks pretty sheepish. He knows the jig is up. He's not very "maleness". His hair must be wearing ordinary mayonnaise. He'll lose the hat rack fight. He'll lose his job at the Scamboat Casino and Lounge. And most importantly, he won't wake up in the morning next to the exhausted form of Maude, slip back into his wrinkled tux and sneak out the door with her pillow stuck to the back of his head. What a loser.

Elizabeth Taylor - Swell necking.

There's a thing in commercial art (not just art for advertising, but almost any art you get paid for) where the work of any artist is scrutinized more harshly than a photograph would be in the same situation. Yes, photographer's contact sheets are pored over with insane criticism, but when people know it's rendered, the threshold of "realistic" is much higher than reality itself. My old boss used to say "It doesn't have to be right. It has to look right." Case in point: Liz Taylor's neck.

This is a photograph of Elizabeth Taylor, and she's tilting her head to one side to look winsome or wistful or something with a "W". If this were a painting, the artist would be well advised to present the composition in sketch form first, because people would assume the neck angle is a mistake or an error in judgment. "He neck must be broken. Was she in a car accident?" But here's Liz, right as rain, tilting her head like crazy.


The P.A.G. Nomenclature Squadron has yet to devise a name for this "Tendency for Art to be Judged More Harshly than Photographs" (TAGMHP) thing, but the reasons it happens are not a mystery. People don't tend to question photographs because we still assume they're real. The Photoshop factor has eroded this a bit, but people don't tend to assume you sabotaged your own photograph in Photoshop to make a woman's neck look broken. They will happily assume you drew your sketch poorly, overshooting "winsome" and barreling straight into "crippled". This will happen even if you sketched the model in a perfectly plausible pose, if a bit of an awkward one.

The Ephemera Preservation Dept won't let me mangle a magazine just for the sake of taking it's picture, so I couldn't cut out the page. This ad was printed right into the cleavage of the magazine's binding. Actually, "cleavage" is a bit vulgar, isn't it? Ahem. This ad was printed right into the groin of the magazine's binding, and as such, the name of Liz's new movie is obscured. No matter. We can joke up some of our own.

"Elizabeth Taylor, co-starring in M-G-M's 'Cat on a Hot Tin Rickety Ladder' "

"Elizabeth Taylor, co-starring in 'Her Shoulder Whispered Sweet Secrets' "

"Elizabeth Taylor, co-starring in 'Dial M for Vertebrae' "

"Elizabeth Taylor, co-starring in 'Bury My Neck at Wounded Neck'  Lips by Max Factor, Eyebrows by Sharpie."

Stopette - Zap. You don't smell.

In 1951, lasers were a young science, which makes it all the more surprising that the Jules Monteneir company developed, in that year, the first deodorant applied by laser.

Initially, it seemed like the most obvious application of the technology, since a lasing medium can be created in a number of ways, including by gas and chemical means. It seemed to the researchers at Jules Monteneir that it would be simple to use part of the chemical ingredients in the deodorant product as a gain medium. Then, by means of a small pump laser and it's power supply, carried in an easily portable wagon connected by a thin umbilicus of cables and hoses, the light was channeled through a surprisingly clever (for the time) miniaturized combined optical cavity and beam splitter, housed in the nozzle of the plastic bottle.

Like modern color laser printers, the deodorant product was applied like toner, and due to the accuracy of the lasers, reproducability of an exact underarm spray pattern was nearly flawless from morning to morning... so long as the user mounted the bottle gently in a small bench vise.

However, accidents occurred due to customer error. Many women preferred to hold the bottle in their hand like ordinary deodorant. This upset the delicate components in the mechanism. The lasing medium  could become contaminated by deuterium gas from the deodorant product, creating a deuterium fluoride laser, instead of the intended - and safer - hydrogen fluoride laser. Injuries ranged from second degree dermal burns to accidental amputation.

The landmark case of Rogers vs. Jules Monteneir brought a sudden end to the company's dream of laser-applied cosmetics. In the accident, a customer lost her right arm and brought down a Cessna 190 airplane before emergency crews could get her deodorant to shut off. The resulting settlement brought a string of similar lawsuits, and the company folded in the fall of 1952 under the financial burned of the legal fees.

The remaining stock of Stopette deodorant was sold off to private laboratories as well as the U.S. Navy, where the deodorant applicators were slightly detuned and found new life stripping paint from warships. One such ship was the USS Juneau, which was instrumental in a few of the naval battles during the Korean war, including the sinking of a North Korean ammunition ship at Inchon. One of the crew was quoted as joking "Poof! There goes ammunition!"

The cosmetics industry learned a lesson from the failure of Stopette laser-applied products, and to this day, high energy cosmetics science courses at major universities still suffer low enrollment.

Steam Bath for Face - Temporarily moistens wrinkles.

Joke #1 - "Shaped to fit the face, a new "steam bath" manufactured in Germany opens the skin pores for beauty treatment, and efficiently atomizes bacteria and other filth growing in the difficult-to-clean base of the machine for easy inhalation."

Joke #2 - The most popular advertisement in the record-breaking May 1952 issue of "Modern Burp Sniffer magazine.

Joke #3 - "Coming, motherrrr! Just give me a minute to install my face, concealing my monstrous reptilian identity!"

Joke #4 - The most nerve-wracking moment of any girl's grammar school career: inserting her face in the machine that will measure, analyze, and tell her, once and for all, if she is indeed "butt-ugly".

Joke #5 - Becky wasn't sure she could make it through the first semester. She had wanted to go to public school with all her friends from eighth grade, but mom and dad had sent her to Saint Priscilla's School for the Undainty. Scripture readings at every meal. Poise classes instead of gym. And 'Young  Earth Theory" instead of science class. Some days she felt like her only friend was her General Electric "Scream Sealer".

Joke #6 - Here at Maybelline advanced research laboratories, a pretty young staffer tests a prototype device that correctly aligns the facial bones, "cutens" the soft tissue structure, and "un-gapes" the pores before sealing the face with weather resistant eurethane varnish and an experimental "youth clamp". Marketing has temporarily named the device "True Me".

Joke #7 - Nintendo's Virtual Boy gets an update for 2011, renamed the "Fun Funnel". Instead of a conventional game pad or mere motion controller, the game console features revolutionary "tongue input control" for total gaming immersion. The unit will ship with three games "Super Prom Kiss", "Mario Strep Test" and "Zelda Twelve: Myth of the Mouth Taster". No refunds or exchanges.

Joke #8 - Shaped to fit the face, a new "steam bath" manufactured in Germany opens the skin pores for a beauty treatment or provides medicinal vapor for inhalation. The device was retooled after the previous year's failure of the "steam bath for crotch" machine.

Seaforth - Fathers' day caucus.

I've never heard of Seaforth grooming products. By the looks of the ad, fathers used Seaforth products on the campaign trail to win the love of the fickle pre-teen male electorate, who could vote, apparently.

It is a little known fact that president Eisenhower's landslide 1952 election victory against Adlai Stevenson was won in large part by his devotion to the concerns of boys all over America. Stevenson mistakenly addressed pre-adolescent male issues with reason and even-handedness, having been thrown off the mark by poorly conducted early election polls. Eisenhower easily won the confidence of boys aged 8-12 with his widely embraced "no more girls" policy and strong opinion against slingshot control. After winning the endorsement of Dennis the Menace, Eisenhower's victory was all but assured, and Stevenson was handed a stinging defeat.

This ad features a really great painting by an unnamed artist. It's got that beautiful impressionistic brushwork that I envy so much in the work of Gil Elvgren and Haddon Sundblom. As always right click on it for a larger version.

It reminds me of my days as an adoring boy, greeting my dad at the breakfast table on Fathers' Day, carrying hand-lettered signs smeared with feces, just like in the picture. Great days.