Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look at the Beauty Products that Changed the World. Sali Hughes
Benetint in particular was huge. Now, Benefit is one of Britain’s top five bestselling colour brands. Some of their products are superb: they are particularly good at brows, bronzers and highlighters, but that original nipple tint remains its hero. When brushed onto the right skin and rubbed in with fingertips, it adds a pretty, effortless rose flush straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite watercolour that, sadly, I can only admire second-hand.
Mason Pearson Hairbrushes
I don’t know if you’ve ever sat in a hairdresser’s salon and witnessed your stylist find themselves temporarily unable to locate his or her Mason Pearson hairbrush, but I have on several occasions and can assure you it’s not pretty. Woe betide any chancer who attempted to make off with it. This is because a Mason Pearson rubber cushion brush remains, over 200 years after its original invention, the gold standard throughout the hairdressing world, with each owner feeling as attached to theirs as a chef to her favourite paring knife. I feel similarly about my own cherished brushes.
I encountered my first Mason Pearson at around six years old, when my aunt came to stay from London with a girlfriend who unpacked a large Mason Pearson and placed it ceremoniously on my tiny dressing table next to her Z-bed. Before then, I’d thought that hairbrushes were two quid jobs from the corner shop or chemist and associated them with tortuous and tear-filled detangling sessions in front of the fire – so fraught that my father once felt a yellow plastic handle, defeated by a knot as unyielding as a boulder, snap clean in half in my hair and sort of dangle, like Fay Wray in King Kong’s clutches. The Mason Pearson was different. Like the Mary Poppins of hairbrushes, it was firm, sturdy and no-nonsense but kind, modest and uncommonly elegant. Sadly, there was no way a family like ours could ever spend a week’s grocery money on a hairbrush, and so I had to wait until adulthood, when I was earning my own money and found myself in a traditional chemist in Mayfair ostensibly looking for Nurofen. That same 19-year-old ‘Handy’ sized Mason Pearson is still on my dressing table today, nobly doing its job, while an 8-year-old ‘Pocket’ size lives permanently in my handbag.
It’s endlessly satisfying to me that in an age of ceramic-barrelled, laser-cut, heated and rotating contraptions, this high-quality British-made icon prevails. Anyone who’s ever owned a Mason Pearson will know why. The weighty plastic handle (or a wooden one if you’re a purist – they’re still available on some models) feels smooth and solid in the hand, the bristles (natural bristle for fine hair, a bristle and nylon mix for normal hair, nylon bristles for thick and curly hair) glide through locks like a spoon through cream, gently massaging the scalp to dislodge dirt and distribute natural oils down the shaft, thus eliminating frizz. It backcombs brilliantly, neither scratches nor pulls, tames hair without causing static, and dries fringes or bangs better than anything (just pull the brush back and forth across your forehead while the dryer nozzle points downward). The Mason Pearson can also be used on children’s hair (I invariably buy the child’s size as christening gifts) without them wailing from bath to bedtime. The brush itself is extremely easy – and satisfying – to clean with a sturdy wide-toothed comb.
Of course, any Mason Pearson owner would be lying if they claimed not to have been drawn, at least in part, to its heirloom-worthy looks. The signature gold-blocked ‘Dark Ruby’ (black on first glance, a gemstone red when held up to the light) handle and orange rubber cushion make it utilitarian but elegant, and recognisable the world over. And despite the incomparability of the Mason Pearson, so many are still trying to copy it, even marking up the already painful price point. It’s wholly unseemly and I reject them utterly.
Clairol Herbal Essences
Let’s be perfectly honest, there’s nothing exceptional or special about Herbal Essences shampoo and conditioner. They smell rather lovely, they do the job perfectly well, they come at a great price point, can be bought anywhere and their name sounds pleasingly like a reggae compilation album circa 1973. What makes them iconic is a single marketing campaign, conceived as a do-or-die last-chance saloon for a tired-looking haircare franchise at Clairol, at a time when Herbal Essences was a generic family haircare brand with no USP to speak of. By the late 1990s, beauty brands using natural plant extracts were a dime to a dozen, many of them doing it more thoroughly and more authentically. Herbal Essences had always been marketed at everyone, and thereby appealed to no one.
Ad execs decided to give the brand a boot up the backside with a campaign zoning in on women rather than the entire family. Borrowing heavily from Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally, the groundbreaking new campaign featured women, standing alone in the shower, loudly climaxing as they lathered up with Herbal Essences shampoo, suggesting that this run-of-the-mill brand was far from an unremarkable, stuffy seventies relic, but a ‘totally orgasmic’ experience. The ads were pretty tame – cheeky rather than softly pornographic – but for a generation of women who’d grown up in token sex education classes without ever hearing mention of the female orgasm, they represented a sea-change in middle-of-the-road beauty advertising and marketing. Herbal Essences was no longer about the dutiful housewife leaning over the bath to wash her children’s hair while a chicken roasted in the oven, it was a brand for women and recognised their need for ‘me time’ (I promise I will never use this mortifying expression again). Of course, the campaign rather overstated the product’s effects – unless a woman was to be more imaginative with the water hose, a shower with Herbal Essences was unlikely to yield greater results than cleaner hair. And it’s true that after we became inured to the original gimmick, and other brands pushed the envelope further, Clairol was back to square one. We now lived in a world where reality TV stars had sex on telly and defecated in front of six hidden cameras.
In the mid-noughties, P&G, having acquired Clairol, redesigned and relaunched Herbal Essences, scrapping the pastel bottles and Totally Orgasmic Experience in favour of lurid brights and a red carpet-wannabe message. These effects were also short-lived. A few years later, P&G rightly went back to the old, by now iconic bottles and smells. Where that leaves Herbal Essences is anyone’s guess. Where it perhaps leaves women is with little more than sexual frustration and a pleasant, vaguely chemical herbal scent.
Old Spice
Old Spice Original, launched in 1938, is the smell from the backseat of my grandad’s brown Austin Allegro as he drove me to Little Chef for the giddy treat of jumbo cod, chips, banana split and a free lollipop for clearing my plate. Its warm, not-too-strong but lasting spiciness is the smell of day trips to Tenby, of candy-stripe brushed flannel sheets from the market, of a tiny metalwork room made from a cubby-hole under the stairs. It’s the smell of the armchair where we took Sunday naps during the rugby, had cuddles and belly laughs in front of Victoria Wood’s As Seen On TV, where my grandad sat patiently as I stood on a stool behind him, tying bows, plaits, jewels and fancy clips in his white hair, not giving a damn if he had to answer the door for the postman.
Old Spice is the scent of him trying to teach me long division when everyone else had long ago lost patience, of very gentle flirting with the checkout ladies at Kwiksave, of seemingly endless chats with every Indian and Pakistani immigrant in Blackwood to practise his beloved Urdu and Burmese learned during the Second World War in Burma. It’s the smell that filled a silent room whenever I asked what had happened to his friends there. Old Spice is the smell of his old shirt worn over my ra-ra dress to wash the car, of well-thumbed Robert Ludlum novels, of huge cotton handkerchiefs, of an often empty wallet, of the green zip-up anorak bought via twenty weekly payments from the Peter Craig catalogue. Old Spice was there when J.R. Ewing was shot, when I first saw Madonna on Top of the Pops, when the miners went back to work and when we sat under blankets at military tattoos, both of us weeping like newborns. Its absence was felt acutely when I last saw his face, eyes closed in the room of a hospice; when I got married and when my babies were born.
Clearly, I’m too sentimental about Old