A sunburn remedy from the Maryland shore and a name taken from a customer’s remark.

Noxzema dates itself to 1914. The brand’s own website still describes the product as “a deep, tingling clean since 1914,” and English Wikipedia, citing a New York Times history of the product published in April 1972, says that it was sold from that year in a small cobalt-blue jar. The jar is plastic today, Wikipedia notes, but it is still blue.

The formula itself has a longer back story. Wikipedia, citing a 2009 Baltimore Sun column by Jacques Kelly, says the original recipe was devised by Dr. Francis J. Townsend, a physician and druggist who worked in the Maryland towns of Snow Hill, Berlin and Ocean City, near the Atlantic beaches. He called it “Townsend R22,” and it was known locally as “no-eczema.” He prescribed it mainly to holidaymakers who had been badly burned by the sun.

Townsend later passed the formula to George Avery Bunting, a Baltimore druggist who, according to the same sources, denied the transaction for many years. Wikipedia says that in about 1917 Bunting began selling the cream as “Dr. Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy,” presenting it as an alternative to the greasy, tallow-based medicated creams of the day, and that for the first three years Bunting and Elizabeth Buck mixed, heated and poured the product themselves. The cream was then renamed Noxzema. The New York Times account of 1972 gives the name story: a satisfied customer is supposed to have exclaimed that the cream had “knocked” his eczema. An early slogan, the Baltimore Sun recorded, was “The miracle cream of Baltimore.”

The business grew into the Noxzema Chemical Company. Wikipedia’s article on the company, citing a 1937 issue of Life, says a factory opened in a house in Baltimore in 1920; the brand article, citing a 1938 yearbook, says the company broke ground on a small factory at West 32nd Street and Falls Cliff Road in 1926, the same year it applied to register its trademark. By the 1940s the cream was sold across the United States, and in 1949, The New York Times reported, management passed to the founder’s son.

From a family company to Procter & Gamble, Alberto-Culver, Unilever and Evermark.

In the 1950s the company widened its range. Wikipedia’s Noxell article says it moved into shaving cream, cold cream, suntan lotion and suntan oil, and in the late 1950s created the CoverGirl cosmetics line. In 1966 the business was renamed the Noxell Corporation, still owned by the Bunting family, and the founder’s grandson, George L. Bunting Jr., took charge in 1973. A 1990 New York Times obituary of a later executive records that the company moved its headquarters out of Baltimore to a building complex in Cockeysville, Maryland.

The family era ended in 1989, when Procter & Gamble bought Noxell, as The New York Times reported that September. Under P&G the brand was pushed toward younger women: in June 1998 The New York Times described a new Noxzema campaign in “nontraditional media,” aimed at women aged 21 and over, and in April 1999 Advertising Age reported on a line extension called Noxzema Skin Fitness.

P&G sold the brand in 2008. Advertising Age reported in September of that year that Noxzema had found a new home with Alberto-Culver. Two years later, on 27 September 2010, Unilever agreed to buy Alberto-Culver, which brought Noxzema into the Anglo-Dutch group. The brand’s path outside the United States was not always the same: in October 2014 the Greek business news site Capital.gr reported that Sarantis, a Greek company, had acquired the Noxzema brand in Greece from P&G.

Unilever later moved the brand out of its core business. Wikipedia, citing the trade title Happi, says that in April 2021 Unilever set up Elida Beauty as a standalone business for a group of its heritage brands, among them Noxzema, Q-tips, Pond’s and VO5. Reuters reported on 18 December 2023 that Unilever would sell Elida Beauty to the private equity firm Yellow Wood Partners, which had bought the North American rights to Suave earlier that year. In January 2026, Wikipedia says, citing PE Hub and Premium Beauty News, Elida Beauty and the Suave Brands Company merged to form Evermark, based in Hackensack, New Jersey. The Noxzema website now carries a 2026 copyright line in the name of Evermark, LLC, and says it is directed only to consumers in the United States.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sell razors, shaving creams, gels and depilatories, the everyday products of the bathroom shelf. Shaving and hair-removal brands in general are bought often and quickly, so their identity has to work at arm’s length, on a crowded shelf, through a name, a colour and a familiar shape of can, tube or handle.

Much of that identity is carried by packaging and advertising rather than by a single logo. A can of shaving cream or gel is a cylinder that can be printed all the way round; a razor is a handle and a cartridge that change shape from one generation to the next; a depilatory is a tube or bottle that sits beside skin creams. Slogans and jingles belong to that identity too, and several of these names have passed between owners over the decades, so the company on the back of the pack may not be the one that first put the name on the front.

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

A blue jar and a shave-cream line people still quote.

The most durable part of the Noxzema identity is its container. The New York Times told the product’s story in 1972 under the headline “1914 to Now: The Little Blue Jar’s Story,” and Wikipedia still describes the brand through the colour of that jar, first cobalt-blue glass and now blue plastic. The current website keeps the founding year in its tagline and divides the range into two families, “Classic Clean” for the original cleansing creams and “Ultimate Clear” for newer cleansers and pads.

The name has also travelled well beyond the jar. Wikipedia notes that, since the cream was introduced, the Noxzema name has appeared on shaving cream, razors and skin-cleansing cloths. Advertising, a 1959 New York Times report said, had begun in the 1940s on radio and in print, and was handled locally at first.

The best-remembered Noxzema advertising was made for the shave cream rather than the skin cream. From 1966 to 1973, Wikipedia says, citing Entertainment Weekly, the model Gunilla Knutsson appeared in national television commercials and magazine advertisements for Noxzema’s aerosol shaving cream, in which she told the viewer, “Take it off. Take it all off.” The commercials were made by the William Esty agency, whose Noxzema reel is held by the Paley Center for Media, and Time magazine discussed the campaign in an article on advertising copycats in July 1969. In 1993 The New York Times Magazine was still recalling the line in Knutsson’s voice.

The brand has carried both a women’s face cream with a Maryland pharmacy origin and a men’s shaving cream known for a single spoken line. Procter & Gamble’s campaigns of the late 1990s addressed women, while in Greece the name passed in 2014 to Sarantis, separately from the American business.

For a design guide, Noxzema shows how a container colour and a founding year can hold a brand together through a family company, three multinational owners and a private-equity group, and how one advertising line can outlive the product it sold. Compare it with Barbasol, another American shave cream, and Gillette, the shaving brand of Procter & Gamble, which owned Noxzema from 1989 to 2008. For this guide we use jar cobalt and cool blue on cream white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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