What the Dog Saw [42]
“Because I’m worth it” and “Does she or doesn’t she?” were powerful, then, precisely because they were commercials, for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation. “We discovered in the first few years of the ‘Because I’m worth it’ campaign that we were getting more than our fair share of new users to the category — women who were just beginning to color their hair,” Sennott told me. “And within that group we were getting those undergoing life changes, which usually meant divorce. We had far more women who were getting divorced than Clairol had. Their children had grown, and something had happened, and they were reinventing themselves.” They felt different, and Ilon Specht gave them the means to look different — and do we really know which came first, or even how to separate the two? They changed their lives and their hair. But it wasn’t one thing or the other. It was both.
7.
In the midnineties, the spokesperson for Clairol’s Nice ’n Easy was Julia Louis-Dreyfus, better known as Elaine from Seinfeld. In the Clairol tradition, she is the girl next door — a postmodern Doris Day. But the spots themselves could not be less like the original Polykoff campaigns for Miss Clairol. In the best of them, Louis-Dreyfus says to the dark-haired woman in front of her on a city bus, “You know, you’d look great as a blonde.” Louis-Dreyfus then shampoos in Nice ’n Easy Shade 104 right then and there, to the gasps and cheers of the other passengers. It is Shirley Polykoff turned upside down: funny, not serious; public, not covert.
L’Oréal, too, has changed. Meredith Baxter Birney said “Because I’m worth it” with an earnestness appropriate to the line. By the time Cybill Shepherd became the brand spokeswoman, in the eighties, it was almost flip — a nod to the materialism of the times — and today, with Heather Locklear, the spots have a lush, indulgent feel. “New Preference by L’Oréal,” she says in one of the current commercials. “Pass it on. You’re worth it.” The “because” — which gave Ilon Specht’s original punch line such emphasis — is gone. The forceful I’m has been replaced by you’re. The Clairol and L’Oréal campaigns have converged. According to the Spectra marketing firm, there are almost exactly as many Preference users as Nice ’n Easy users who earn between fifty thousand and seventy-five thousand dollars a year, listen to religious radio, rent their apartments, watch the Weather Channel, bought more than six books last year, are fans of professional football, and belong to a union.
But it is a tribute to Ilon Specht and Shirley Polykoff’s legacy that there is still a real difference between the two brands. It’s not that there are Clairol women or L’Oréal women. It’s something a little subtler. As Herzog knew, all of us, when it comes to constructing our sense of self, borrow bits and pieces, ideas and phrases, rituals and products from the world around us — over-the-counter ethnicities that shape, in some small but meaningful way, our identities. Our religion matters, the music we listen to matters, the clothes we wear matter, the food we eat matters — and our brand of hair dye matters, too. Carol Hamilton, L’Oréal’s vice president of marketing, says she can walk into a hair-color focus group and instantly distinguish the Clairol users from the L’Oréal users. “The L’Oréal user always exhibits a greater air of confidence, and she usually looks better — not just her hair color, but she always has spent a little more time putting on her makeup, styling her hair,” Hamilton told me. “Her clothing is a little bit more fashion-forward. Absolutely, I can tell the difference.” Jeanne Matson, Hamilton’s counterpart at Clairol, says she can do the same thing. “Oh, yes,” Matson told me. “There’s no doubt. The Clairol woman would represent more the American-beauty icon, more naturalness. But it’s more of a beauty for me, as opposed to a beauty