The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [87]
Americans were so unfamiliar with the term that Listerine’s ads continued to define halitosis for at least five years. But people had noticed bad breath at least since the ancient Greeks. And Americans were not unfamiliar with romances that didn’t materialize, marriages that didn’t happen or mysteriously failed, and job offers or promotions that never came. The reason behind many of these everyday heartbreaks, Lambert Pharmacal assured the public in a series of compulsively readable ads, was unpleasant breath.
Take Edna, a charming flapper whose birthdays crept alarmingly toward “that tragic thirty—mark,” while she remained “often a bridesmaid but never a bride.” Or Smedley, a man with good marriage prospects until women caught a whiff of his breath. Halitosis could even threaten the mother-child bond: an ad titled “Are you unpopular with your own children?” shows a scowling little boy resisting his mother’s embrace. The most worrying thing about halitosis (and the most lucrative for the makers of Listerine) was that no one was likely to tell you that you had it, nor could you discover it for yourself. And, according to the ads, it was a nationwide epidemic, attested to by hotel clerks, who declared that one in three people seeking a room had halitosis, and by dentists, 83 per cent of whom said they encountered it frequently in patients.
Surgical antiseptic, mouthwash and, in 1929, another use for Listerine: as a facial astringent.
Listerine’s claim that it eliminated local, non-organic halitosis by halting “food fermentation” in the mouth remains unproved. But with almost no change to the bottle or its contents, Lambert turned its forty-year-old formula into an overnight success. Gargling became part of America’s morning routine, and Lambert’s annual profits rose from $115,000 in 1921 to more than $8 million in 1928. “Often a bridesmaid, but never a bride,” which is still one of the twentieth century’s best-known slogans, epitomizes the advertising technique known as “whisper copy” or “advertising by fear.” Inspired by Listerine’s success, marketers tried using technical, medical-sounding names for other ailments or conditions—comedone for blackhead, bromodosis for smelly feet, tinea trichophyton for athlete’s foot.
“If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other… It is essentially a form of education; and the progress of civilization depends on education.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
As it turned out, no one duplicated the magnitude of Listerine’s success, but it suggested the depths of people’s insecurity about their physical appeal and their readiness to seek remedies. Perhaps most important, the ad campaign changed unpleasant breath from a piece of bad luck to an example of antisocial behaviour. As an ad for breath mints announced in 1925, “A few years ago, bad breath was condoned as an unavoidable misfortune. Today it is judged one of the gravest social offenses.” From the 1920s on, the onus was on everybody to gargle, deodorize and clean oneself vigilantly, because unsuspected transgressions would not be treated lightly.
“So you fly off back home. Wash your hands. Why, surely. You’ve got so much soap in the United States.”
—Marlene Dietrich, playing a Berlin singer, to an American lover in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, 1948
Although deodorants had been available since the 1880s, the first generation worked by attempting to close the pores with wax. (Shades of Francis Bacon’s