Nice 'n Easy (hair coloring)
Nice ’n Easy is a shampoo-in permanent hair-coloring product for home use. It was introduced in 1965, billed as the first shampoo-in hair color, with the advertising tagline, “The closer he gets...the better you look.”[1]
Manufactured by Clairol (now a division of Procter & Gamble), Nice ’n Easy extended the company’s home hair color product lines, which debuted in 1956 with Miss Clairol Hair Color Bath and the famous “Does she...or doesn’t she?” advertising campaign.[2]
History
In the 1950s, just 7% of American women used hair color (or admitted to doing so), at a time when the common belief was that only actresses, models and other women considered promiscuous altered their natural shade.[3] To help change that attitude, Clairol eschewed celebrities in favor of the average woman for its Miss Clairol and Nice ’n Easy hair color campaigns.[4]
The idea to buck the trend of that era’s advertising style — which emphasized high glamour rather than girl-next-door vignettes — was the brainchild of lead copywriter Shirley Polykoff, whose work on the Clairol hair color campaign was a career high point.[3] In her original memo to Clairol, Polykoff, who was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Fame in 1980,[5] described the Clairol woman as “Cashmere-sweater-over-the-shoulder types. Like larger-than-life-portraits of the proverbial girl on the block who’s a little prettier than your wife and lives in a house slightly nicer than yours.”[4] Polykoff created the "Does she...or doesn't she" campaign for Miss Clairol in 1956, and the "The closer he gets...the better you look" campaign for the launch of Nice 'N Easy in 1965.[3][5]
Nice ’n Easy Product Line
The entire Nice ’n Easy line includes nine products available in a total of 48 shades. The best-selling shade is 106A Natural Dark Neutral Blonde. The best-selling shade for Nice ‘n Easy Root Touch-Up is shade #5, Medium Brown. Nice ’n Easy products are:
- Nice ’n Easy Perfect 10: Ten-minute coverage plus six weekly applications of the Clairol’s ColorSeal Intensive Conditioning Crème.
- Nice ’n Easy Permanent Color: A blend of three tones that use Clairol’s color-blend technology for highlights, lowlights and gray coverage.
- Nice ’n Easy Gray Solution: Designed for total gray coverage; includes pretreatment retexturizing solution.
- Nice ’n Easy Root Touch-Up: Covers root regrowth between colorings.
- Nice ’n Easy Frost & Tip: For allover highlighting.
- Nice ’n Easy Hairpainting: To highlight the top layer of hair.
- Nice ’n Easy Born Blonde: Uniform allover lightening for very light to very dark hair.
- Nice ’n Easy ColorSeal Conditioner: A conditioning treatment specifically for color-treated hair.
References
- ^ Branna, Tom (18 January 2013). "A Colorful History". HAPPI (Rodman Media). Retrieved 10 January 2016.
- ^ Klara, Robert (28 Feb 2013). "How Clairol Hair Color Went From Taboo to New You". Adweek. Retrieved 10 January 2016.
- ^ a b c Thomas Jr, Robert McG. (8 Jun 1998). "Shirley Polykoff, 90, Ad Writer Whose Query Colored A Nation". New York Times. Retrieved 10 January 2016.
- ^ a b Gladwell, Malcolm (2009). Obsessives, Pioneers, and Other Varieties of Minor Genius: Part One from What the Dog Saw. Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 9780316086141. Chapter: "True Colors: Hair Dye and the Hidden History of Postwar America"
- ^ a b "Polykoff, Shirley (1908-1998)". AdvertisingAge. 15 Sep 2003. Retrieved 11 January 2016.
External links
- "True Colors" (archived here), article from The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell on hair coloring advertising