An imported tint, a salon product and a launch at a trade show.

Clairol began as an import. English Wikipedia says the business was founded in 1931 by the Americans Joan Gelb and her husband Lawrence M. Gelb, together with their business partner James Romeo, after the couple came across hair-colouring preparations while travelling in France. They named the company after the preparation, Clairol, and brought the product back to sell to beauty salons in the United States. For its early decades the business was a salon supplier rather than a name on a shop shelf, and the customers who mattered were hairdressers.

The product that changed that arrived after the Second World War. Wikipedia dates the Miss Clairol Hair Color Bath to 1949, describing it as a single-step colouring product for salon use. Malcolm Gladwell, writing in The New Yorker in March 1999, explained what the bath did: it let a user lighten, tint, condition and shampoo in one step, applying a shade in a peroxide solution directly to the hair. He named two of the shades of the period, Topaz, for a champagne blond, and Moon Gold, for a medium ash, and those names already show the brand’s habit of selling colour through evocative words rather than numbers alone.

The launch to the trade was a piece of theatre. Wikipedia and Gladwell both quote Bruce Gelb, a son of the founders and later a Clairol executive, on the live demonstration of Miss Clairol at the International Beauty Show in New York. The hairdressers watching, he said, were convinced the company was doing something to the models behind the scenes, so the sales staff brought buckets of water and rinsed the colour out in front of everyone. A demonstration on a stage, in front of the professionals who would use the product, was the brand’s introduction.

The next step took the bath out of the salon. Wikipedia says that in 1956, after two decades of selling hair tint to beauty salons, Clairol launched an at-home version of Miss Clairol Hair Color Bath. Gladwell describes it as the product that allowed women to colour their hair quickly and easily at home, and he adds the problem that came with it: in the mid-1950s, colouring your hair still carried a stigma, and the prospect of a disapproving family was enough to keep many women away from the bottle. Solving that problem was a job for advertising, and the answer became the brand’s long-running line.

Bristol-Myers, Procter & Gamble, Coty and Wella Company.

The founders sold the company in the late 1950s. Wikipedia records that the Gelbs sold Clairol to Bristol-Myers, and that their sons Bruce and Richard L. Gelb went on to executive roles at the pharmaceutical company. Richard Gelb became chief executive of Bristol-Myers in 1972; the company merged with the Squibb Corporation in 1989 to form Bristol-Myers Squibb, and he remained chief executive until 1993. Clairol remained a division of that group until 2001, and in that time it added home colour lines that still carry the name.

The best known of those lines is Nice ’n Easy. Wikipedia’s timeline dates it to 1965 and records the slogan used to introduce it, “The closer he gets, the better you look.” As of 2014, Wikipedia says, Clairol’s hair-colour products were sold under names including Nice ’n Easy, Natural Instincts and Perfect Lights, with the range covering permanent and semi-permanent colour as well as highlighting and blonding products.

The division changed hands at the start of the new century. Wikipedia says Procter & Gamble bought Clairol from Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2001, and that P&G added the German hair-care group Wella in 2003. In 2007, according to the same article, P&G Beauty announced that it would close Clairol’s old site in Stamford, Connecticut, splitting plant operations between Massachusetts and Mexico and moving administration to Cincinnati.

Procter & Gamble then passed its hair-colour business on. Wikipedia records that Coty acquired Clairol from P&G in 2016 as part of a larger purchase of beauty brands. Four years later the professional and hair-colour business was reorganised again: on 1 December 2020, Wikipedia says, Coty completed the sale of a majority stake in the business holding Wella, Clairol, OPI and ghd to the investment firm KKR, keeping a minority stake for itself. That business trades as Wella Company, whose own website lists Clairol in a portfolio alongside Wella Professionals, Sebastian Professional, ghd, OPI, Nioxin and Briogeo. Wella Company has held Clairol since 2020.

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.

A copywriter, a question and a child in every picture.

The line that made Clairol a household name was written by Shirley Polykoff. Wikipedia and Gladwell’s 1999 New Yorker essay agree that Clairol gave the account to the advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding, and that in 1956 the agency handed it to Polykoff, then a junior copywriter. Gladwell traces the slogan to her own life: years earlier, meeting her future husband’s family, she had imagined his mother asking, in Yiddish, whether she coloured her hair or not. Translated into English, the question became “Does she … or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.”

The pictures were planned as carefully as the words. Gladwell quotes Polykoff’s original memo to Clairol asking for “Shirtwaist types instead of glamour gowns” — models closer to the girl next door than to the high-glamour women of other beauty advertising. The print advertisements, he writes, always included a child beside the mother, with the same shade of hair. The child took the edge off the slogan’s double meaning, made it plain that mothers were the women using Miss Clairol, and, above all, provided a precise colour match: a viewer could not tell that the mother’s shade came from a bottle.

Polykoff kept writing for the brand for years. Gladwell credits her with the Lady Clairol lines “Is it true blondes have more fun?” and “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” — a line that Wikipedia says the actress Rosemary Rice recorded for the campaign — and with “The closer he gets, the better you look” for Nice ’n Easy. He notes that Clairol’s television spots of that era used male voice-overs, and that for a Miss Clairol campaign in the 1970s Polykoff wrote the tag line “This I do for me.” She gave up the account in the seventies, he writes.

Gladwell’s essay sets the Clairol campaigns against the work that followed them in the hair-colour category, and it reads the early Clairol voice as “other-directed”: the slogans were about what the group said, or what a husband might think. That voice is the brand’s central design idea. The product was a colour in a box, but the identity was a question asked in public and answered in private, illustrated by a mother and child whose matching hair did the persuading.

For a design guide, Clairol shows how a single line of copy and a strict picture rule — ordinary models, a matching child, a shade named like a jewel — can carry a brand through four owners. Compare it with Just For Men, which sells home colour to men, and Herbal Essences, a shampoo Clairol once advertised under its own name. For this guide we use deep plum and honey blonde on shell with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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