A shampoo in a tube, launched from Cincinnati.

Prell is a Procter & Gamble brand by birth. The brand’s own website says Prell Shampoo was first introduced by Procter & Gamble, based in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1947.

The launch format was not the bottle many people remember. Printer’s Devil, a Canadian blog on advertising history, describes Prell arriving as a competitor to Colgate-Palmolive’s Lustre-Crème, a cream shampoo then on the market for three years, and notes that, like Lustre-Crème, Prell was first packaged in a tube. The blog sets advertisements for the two brands side by side: Prell promised hair that was “radiantly alive,” while Lustre-Crème talked about restoring natural sheen.

The copy of the period gives a sense of the voice P&G built for the brand. According to the same blog, Prell advertisements told readers to “Try Prell and you’ll be thrilled at the difference just one shampoo makes,” promised hair so soft and smooth that it would fall into natural waves, and declared that “Prell’s Cleaning Action is truly a miracle!” The word radiant became part of the product name itself: the concentrated tube was sold as Prell Radiant Shampoo.

The two rivals even looked alike on the page. Printer’s Devil observes that in the advertisements it compares, Lustre-Crème ran a half-page photograph at the top while Prell placed an equally large photograph at the bottom, and that both showed their tubes of shampoo. Where Lustre-Crème reached for poetry — hair “that behaves like the angels and shines like the stars” — Prell’s copy leaned instead on its cleaning action and on what it said the company’s own tests had shown. The blog notes that Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive had each begun in the nineteenth century as small family soap and candle businesses.

Donald Deskey, a green liquid and a falling pearl.

The brand credits a well-known industrial designer with one of its packages. Prell’s website says that Concentrated Prell Radiant Shampoo dates to around 1957 and was designed by Donald Deskey, the American designer whose wider work for the same company included packaging for toothpaste, peanut butter and detergent.

The move from tube to bottle changed what shoppers saw. Printer’s Devil notes that Prell was later packaged in a bottle through which “the brilliance of the green colour” shone, and that a television commercial showed a pearl slowly dropping into the Prell bottle to demonstrate how thick and rich the shampoo was.

That green became the thing people remembered. The brand’s website says Prell became widely recognised for its distinctive green colour and fresh scent, and points to references in television programmes including Seinfeld, The Simpsons and Drawn Together. The company also describes a premium variant, Prell Pearl, which borrowed the pearl image from the advertising and turned it into a product name.

The current range keeps the original at its centre. Prell’s website now sells Prell Classic Clean shampoo alongside newer shampoos, conditioners, a leave-in conditioner and a repair serum, and its frequently asked questions page says the Prell formula has remained unchanged apart from modifications made to meet regulatory requirements.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group are mass hair-care, dandruff-shampoo and home hair-colour names, the kind sold from drugstore and supermarket shelves rather than salons. Many of them have passed through several owners, from the families or chemists who started them to large consumer-goods groups and, in some cases, to smaller companies that buy older brands and keep them on sale.

On a crowded shelf, a hair-care brand is usually recognised before it is read. A bottle colour, the shape of a cap, a logo set in a particular letterform or a slogan repeated over decades can carry the name further than any single formula. Home hair colour adds its own visual language: the box with a model’s face, the shade chart with numbered and named colours, and the promise that the result will match the picture.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded the brand, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging and advertising have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Prestige Brands, Ultimark, Scott’s Liquid Gold, Prell Products.

Procter & Gamble sold Prell at the end of the 1990s. The Rose Sheet reported on 15 November 1999 that P&G had sold the hair-care line to Prestige Brands, a newly formed consumer-products company based in Bonita Springs, Florida, in an acquisition completed on 1 November. The trade newsletter said P&G had been looking for a buyer for the brand since May of that year, and that details of the deal were not disclosed.

Prestige kept Prell for a decade. The Pink Sheet reported that on 29 October 2009 Prestige Brands Holdings announced the sale of three shampoo brands — Prell, Denorex dandruff shampoo and Zincon dandruff shampoo — to Ultimark Products of Irvington, New York. Matthew Mannelly, Prestige’s president and chief executive, said the sale allowed the company “to increase focus on our two larger segments, over-the-counter healthcare and household cleaning products.”

The three brands moved together again in 2016. Chain Drug Review reported on 7 July 2016 that Scott’s Liquid Gold-Inc., the Denver household and skin-care company, had acquired Prell, Denorex and Zincon from Ultimark Products. Mark Goldstein, its chairman, president and chief executive, called them “great additions to our existing health and beauty care portfolio of products.” The same report listed Scott’s other lines, including Alpha Skin Care and Neoteric Diabetic healing cream, alongside the company’s namesake wood cleaner and its role as a U.S. distributor of Batiste dry shampoo. Writing after that sale, Printer’s Devil noted that Prell was again on the shelves of chains such as Walmart, CVS, Dollar General and Kroger. Today the brand is sold by Prell Products, Inc., which its website says is headquartered in Chicago.

For a design guide, Prell shows how a product colour can carry an identity across owners: a green liquid in a clear bottle, a pearl sinking through it, and a name built on the word radiant. Compare it with Head & Shoulders and Pantene, two shampoo brands still owned by Procter & Gamble. For this guide we use bottle green, mint and pearl with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Prell’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.