A Chicago hair-care house adds an antiperspirant.

Degree was born inside a company better known for shampoo. English Wikipedia’s article on Helene Curtis Industries describes a Chicago firm founded in 1927 as the National Mineral Company by Gerald Gidwitz and Louis Stein, which began with a facial mudpack sold to beauty salons and moved into hair care, first through waving pads for permanent waves and then through shampoos and hair tonics. One of those tonics, launched in 1937, was called Suave, and the same article says the Suave name was later stretched from hair care into deodorants and skin creams before the company added the Finesse and Salon Selectives lines.

The antiperspirant came next. The trade newsletter The Tan Sheet reported in November 1993 that Helene Curtis launched Degree in January 1990, and Wikipedia’s company history calls it, at the time, the company’s most successful new product launch. Both sources tie the brand to one idea: a formula that Helene Curtis advertised as “body heat activated”, in the company’s own wording, meaning that its antiperspirant and fragrance were designed to respond as body temperature rose.

The idea was also tested in public. The Tan Sheet reported that the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus reviewed print advertising for Degree in 1993 after spotting it through its routine monitoring, and in a case report dated 24 November 1993 found that the evidence Helene Curtis submitted supported the body-heat claim; Helene Curtis agreed to drop the word “only” from one line of copy after a rival product with a similar delivery method appeared. The same report named the brand’s advertising agency of record at the time as Saatchi & Saatchi in New York.

The name has a second, more surprising side. English Wikipedia’s article on Rexona records that the Degree name was created by Helene Curtis, yet today Degree is the name under which Unilever sells its global Rexona deodorant line in the United States and Canada. The same article lists the other local names used for that range: Sure in the United Kingdom, Ireland and India, and Rexena in Japan and South Korea. An American brand invented in Chicago in 1990 has therefore become the North American face of a line whose history runs back to Sydney.

From Helene Curtis to Unilever, and back to Sydney.

Helene Curtis did not stay independent for long after Degree arrived. English Wikipedia says that, as the 1990s went on, the company found itself too small to compete internationally with Procter & Gamble and Unilever, and that in February 1996 it agreed to be acquired by Unilever. The purchase brought Degree into the same group as Dove and Axe, and Wikipedia’s article on Rexona states the result plainly: the Degree name was created by Helene Curtis, which Unilever acquired in 1996.

Inside Unilever, Degree met a much older relative. The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, an online reference maintained in Australia, lists the Sheldon Drug Company Pty Ltd from 1904 and the Rexona Pty Company of Sydney from 1908 to 1989, describing a business that made ointments, soap, shaving soap and shaving cream in the early twentieth century. Its timeline then runs through two renamed Australian companies, L & K: Rexona from 1989 to 1993 and Lever Rexona from 1993 to 2000, before reaching Unilever Australasia in 2000. English Wikipedia says Rexona was created in Australia in 1908 and was taken over by the British soap maker Lever Brothers in about 1930, before Lever merged with the Dutch company Margarine Unie to form Unilever.

Wikipedia describes the modern Rexona range as available in aerosols, pumps, roll-ons, sticks and creams, and says the brand launched a range of new fragrances with a new canister design in 2015, changing its formula at the same time. The same article records the local exceptions to the Rexona name, including South Africa, where the range was called Shield and, it says, was rebranded as Rexona in 2026, with both names appearing on packs. In North America the Degree name stayed. Wikipedia notes that Degree is sold for both men and women, in stick, gel and spray forms, and that early sticks carried slogans pressed into the product by the protective seal; it gives the example of the Cool Rush scent, which came with the line “Take The Risk.”

Sport is the brand family’s most visible marketing territory. English Wikipedia lists Rexona’s sponsorship of the Lotus Formula One team from 2012 to 2014 and the Williams team from 2015 to 2019, sponsorships of English football clubs through the Rexona, Rexena and Sure names, and, through Unilever’s partnership with FIFA, a place among the sponsors of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2023 and 2027 Women’s World Cups.

Design and documentation.

Soap, body-wash and deodorant brands are bought often, used daily and chosen in seconds, so their identities rely on signals a shopper can read from across an aisle. A bar of soap can carry its brand in its shape, its colour and the lettering pressed into its surface, as well as on the wrapper or carton around it. Liquids and deodorants move the same work onto bottles, tubes and sticks, where a fixed name panel usually sits above a changing band of colour or a picture that marks each variant.

Scent names do much of the sorting. Fragrances are often given evocative names drawn from places, weather, fruit or flowers rather than chemical descriptions, and a single brand may run many of them side by side, each with its own tint. Ranges also split by user, with separate lines for men, women and children.

Many of the names in this group are long-lived and have changed hands between large companies. Each guide sets out who started the brand, who owns it now and how it presents itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name about temperature and a bottle redesigned for access.

Degree’s most widely reported design project is a piece of packaging rather than a logo. In April 2021 the brand presented Degree Inclusive, which Refinery29 described that month as an adaptive deodorant designed for people with visual impairment and upper-limb motor disabilities. Refinery29 reported that the bottle was created by the architecture and design firm Sour Studio with the creative agency Wunderman Thompson and Unilever, and listed its main features: a hooked handle for one-handed use, magnetic closures to make the cap easier to remove and replace, enhanced grip placement, a braille label and a larger roll-on applicator.

The trade site Personal Care Insights, writing on 30 April 2021, added detail from a Degree spokesperson. It reported that the bottle hangs from a detachable hook lid, that labels and product information are embossed in braille, and that the top half of the bottle can be unscrewed to reveal a refillable chamber. The design, the spokesperson said, went through three rounds of revision, and the team chose a complete redesign of the bottle over a device that could be added to an existing one. Both publications reported that people with disabilities trialled the prototype, with feedback from The Chicago Lighthouse, Open Style Lab and the Muscular Dystrophy Association; Personal Care Insights described the product as a pilot programme for Unilever, with a UK trial expected to begin that August.

The project followed a brand whose public story, from the start, was told in plain technical terms. The Tan Sheet’s 1993 report shows Helene Curtis advertising Degree around a single promise in the company’s own words, “body heat activated,” and placing that promise at the centre of its print advertising through Saatchi & Saatchi. Within Unilever, Wikipedia’s Rexona article shows the same range carrying different local names — Degree in the United States and Canada, Rexona in most other countries, Sure in the United Kingdom, Ireland and India — so that a single product family is presented under several names in different markets.

For a design guide, Degree shows how a brand created for one market can keep its own name while sitting inside a global family, and how a functional promise can be carried into packaging that is redesigned around the people using it. Compare it with Suave, the older Helene Curtis name that also passed to Unilever in 1996, and with its parent, Unilever. For this guide we use a cool blue, deep navy and frost palette with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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