incompatible camps – the culprit and the victim – and it suggested that the company had been wooing one at the expense of the other. More important, it suggested that advertisers, with the right choice of words, could resolve that psychological dilemma with one or, better yet, two little white tablets. Herzog allowed herself a small smile. “So I said the nice thing would be if you could find something that combines these two elements. The copywriter came up with ‘the blahs.’” Herzog repeated the phrase, the blahs, because it was so beautiful. “The blahs was not one thing or the other – it was not the stomach or the head. It was both.”
6.
This notion of household products as psychological furniture is, when you think about it, a radical idea. When we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce. In the list of sixties social heroes, there are musicians and poets and civil-rights activists and sports figures. Herzog’s implication is that such a high-minded list is incomplete. What, say, of Vidal Sassoon? In the same period, he gave the world the Shape, the Acute Angle, and the One-Eyed Ungaro. In the old “cosmology of cosmetology,” McCracken writes, “the client counted only as a plinth… the conveyor of the cut.” But Sassoon made individualization the hallmark of the haircut, liberating women’s hair from the hair styles of the times – from, as McCracken puts it, those “preposterous bits of rococo shrubbery that took their substance from permanents, their form from rollers, and their rigidity from hair spray.” In the Herzogian world view, the reasons we might give to dismiss Sassoon’s revolution – that all he was dispensing was a haircut, that it took just half an hour, that it affects only the way you look, that you will need another like it in a month – are the very reasons that Sassoon is important. If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?
“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
L’Oreal, 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’Oreal,” 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
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’Oreal 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’Oreal’s vice president of marketing, says she can walk into a hair-color focus group and instantly distinguish the Clairol users from the L’Oreal users. “The L’Oreal 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 for the external world. L’Oreal users tend to be a bit more aloof. There is a certain warmth you see in the Clairol people. They interact with each other more. They’ll say, ‘I use Shade 101.’ And someone else will say, ‘Ah, I do, too!’ There is this big exchange.”
These are not exactly the brand personalities laid down by Polykoff and Specht, because this is 1999, and not 1956 or 1973. The complexities of Polykoff’s artifice have been muted. Specht’s anger has turned to glamour. We have been left with just a few bars of the original melody. But even that is enough to ensure that “Because I’m worth it” will never be confused with “Does she or doesn’t she?” Specht says, “It meant I know you don’t think I’m worth it, because that’s what it was with the guys in the room. They were going to take a woman and make her the object. I was defensive and defiant. I thought, I’ll fight you. Don’t you tell me what I am. You’ve been telling me what I am for generations.” As she said
Everybody did.
“Well,” she said, with what we can only imagine was a certain sweet vindication, “I wrote it.”
John Rock’s Error
1.
