Woman / 5th May 1967
They may have well just said: ‘Nyah nyah! Smelly!’. However, deodorant ads aren’t all that different nowadays, with this example proving the point, with the rather insidious phrase ‘Beauty is freedom’. Try telling that to political prisoners, you bunch of tits.
Tags: adverts totally made of wrong, Amplex, blatant sexism, health, retail
Woman's Own / 20th March 1970
Ah, yet another food store chain lost to the mists to time, here. This is just for historical interest: the prize of £100 to spend in a leading London fashion store (in an era where the average female wage was around £1000 per year), so assuming the prize was about 10% of the yearly average female wage, the prize money would probably be around £2500 today (with £250 runner-up vouchers, if we assume they represent 1% of the yearly average female wage). Cor!
Of course, the women of 1970 would have had to put in far more effort to locate the era when the bonnet pictured was in fashion (actually, it doesn’t specify whether they need a year, or era), as they didn’t have the wonderful world of the internet to help them out. My guess, helped by this site, and the reference to the song Daisy Bell is Edwardian-era (1901-1910). Does anyone have a different guess?
Tags: Alliance Foodstores, competition, retail, social history
Woman's Own / 20th March 1970
Sigh. An ad from a more innocent time, where the word ‘gang’ could be used without negative connotations, and plasters were sold in metal canisters. I wonder if selling metal canisters nowadays, to be refilled at a chemist, would be a good way to cope with the large amount of card waste that must occur from modern card boxes, although it’s possibly more trouble than it’s worth.
Anyway, the main reason I put this up was because the boys in the ad look rather sweet, and I was taken by the phonetic spelling of ‘thousands’. I’m sure kids used to look cuter in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Woman's Weekly / 23rd February 1957
Stop sniggering at the back. A reader asked for beauty items, so I decided to rewind 12 years and take this article from the earliest of my magazines; an issue of Women’s Weekly from February 23, 1957. Of course, modern women have all sorts of facial gadgets to help them, as opposed to cold cream and ‘skin freshener’ (toner?), but the main question for me is: if the aim is to cleanse your face, why is the photographic model covered in make up?
Tags: beauty
Woman's Own / 20th June 1969
This advert startled me somewhat, because I’ve never seen a career sold to anyone on the basis of the holiday included. I can only conclude that holiday offered in other jobs didn’t come to much, as 5 weeks is now around the standard in the UK. Nowadays, nursing is more complex than it used to be, and the recruitment is centred firmly on the rewarding aspects of nursing, rather than having time off in the middle of the week to go, er, shopping.
Tags: blatant sexism, careers, nursing, social history
Woman's Own / 20th March 1970
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Of course, telling women that they’re not fully made up without a glass of booze in their hand is an approach that most drink companies would still like to employ, I’d wager. However, the alarming rise in drink-related injuries and illness amongst young women has forced them to add a reminder about drinking responsibly to their still-glamourous ads; a magnificent example, to my mind, of pissing into the wind. (Something young women may be at risk of doing after an excess of whatever’s being advertised.) The causes of excess drinking in a society are always deep-seated and complex, but it’s interesting that The Authorities only started to get really concerned about it when women got in on the act…
Tags: blatant sexism, dodgy advice, Martini, retail, social history
Woman's Own / 20th June 1969
Of course, ice cream with various syrups and toppings are commonplace nowadays, but clearly it wasn’t until the late ’60s that ice cream ‘ripples’ became common. This advert, from Lyons Maid, now part of the Walls behemoth, adopts quite a patronising tone, but it’s tough not to sound like that when you’re instructing the nation’s housewives that they don’t need to add anything to the product. Although I don’t think a glace cherry is going to spoil this young boy’s Strawberry Ripple, I can see their point that old habits die hard, and what brightens up plain ice cream would crowd a ‘complete sweet’. I wonder when that name fell out of use? In any case, this does provide some amusing context to the activities of Sunshine Desserts in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, published some six years later.
Tags: blatant sexism, food, ice cream, kids, Lyons Maid, motherhood, retail, social history
Woman's Own / 20th June 1969
The makers of ‘FitFlop’ will HATE me; but their shoe is nothing new. Scholl got into the ‘exercise sandals’ game long before in 1969, as this ad proves. Groovy!
Tags: blatant sexism, dodgy advice, groovy, retail, social history
Woman's Own / 20th June 1969
Crikey. Sexual innuendo, all for 17 shillings* (85 new pence) a roll. Bargain! And, judging by the pattern of the wallpaper, you get eye damage for free. Can’t say fairer than that.
* Incidentally, if you’re interested, this magazine quotes an average income of £20 a week for a woman, with the pound being made up of 20 shillings, or 240 pence, meaning each wallpaper roll costs about 4% of the weekly female wage.
Tags: blatant sexism, Crown, fashion, household, retail, social history
Woman's Own / 20th June 1969
Milk is only really advertised at children nowadays, so it’s odd to think that women in 1969 needed the health benefits of milk explained to them. This ad appealed to me because of the a) the rather nice picture of a contemporary telephone exchange and b) the novel idea that a glass of milk and an apple makes an acceptable lunch. Not for me, it doesn’t…
Tags: blatant sexism, diets, dodgy advice, food, health, Milk Marketing Board, retail, social history