Читать книгу Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look at the Beauty Products that Changed the World - Sali Hughes - Страница 35

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.