Читать книгу Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look at the Beauty Products that Changed the World - Sali Hughes - Страница 38

I’m sent every conceivable hair product, including luxury shampoos costing upwards of £30, but there are times when nothing hits the spot like a two quid bottle of Pantene. There’s something about its mass-market chemical fragrance that has been weirdly sexy to me from the first time I encountered it in the 1980s, then allowing me to overlook its pretty revolting, albeit hugely successful, advertising slogan of ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’. Everyone used Pantene in those days (I once found myself in a famous supermodel’s bathroom and, not entirely without effort, discovered several Pantene bottles on the go). Personally, it was never my favourite shampoo and isn’t now. But it’s certainly more than serviceable, especially over periods of four to five weeks’ use (after that, it can be prone to causing build-up and lankness and will need to be swapped for a bit – unless you’re using the new-ish silicone-free version, where the problem is largely eradicated).

There’s more to Pantene than shampoo and conditioner, though, of course. The entire brand is based on the discovery in the 1940s by scientists at Swiss drug company Hoffmann-La Roche, that panthenol, a pro-vitamin of B5, had ‘healing effects’ on damaged hair. The Pantene brand – much posher in those days – was born and today (under the different ownership of P&G) there are dozens of hair conditioning products under its umbrella: decent masks, hairsprays and mousses for every hair type, and the world’s first 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner (it was not, contrary to assumptions, Vidal Sassoon’s Wash & Go), all of them built around the same key ingredient of panthenol. Perhaps more relevant to my interests is the continuity throughout the line of that same unmistakable fragrance. It has the sweet, addictive, unisex scent I now think of as the generic smell of ‘clean hair’. I can’t imagine there’ll ever be a time I no longer crave it.