Hoffmann-La Roche, panthenol and a brand born in Basel.

Pantene began as a Swiss product. English Wikipedia says the line was launched in Europe in 1945 by Hoffmann-La Roche, the pharmaceutical company, and that its name is based on panthenol, a vitamin compound. Roche was a Basel business: the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland says it was founded there in 1896 by the merchant banker Fritz Hoffmann-La Roche, and that from 1933 it built up a large business in synthesising vitamins. A brand named after a vitamin compound fitted that company.

The brand’s own telling starts in the laboratory. Procter & Gamble’s Pantene site in the Philippines says Roche scientists worked with panthenol in 1940s Switzerland, and that in the 1960s Roche partnered with a chemist, Dr Gustav Erlemann, whom it calls “The Vitamin Pope,” to develop the first Pantene haircare formula. The same page says that this work laid the foundation for what the brand now calls Pro-V Science. Those are the company’s own words about its history.

Pantene stayed with Roche for several decades. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland lists Pantene, described as cosmetics, among the businesses Roche sold off and dates that sale to 1982, alongside later disposals that included Kontron in 1989, Maag in 1990 and the fragrance and flavour maker Givaudan in 2000. English Wikipedia, for its part, gives Roche as the owner from 1945 to 1985 and says the American company Richardson-Vicks bought the brand in 1985, the year it began to be introduced in the United States and around the world. The two sources differ on the date of the sale.

Richardson-Vicks, Procter & Gamble and Pro-V.

What happened next is not in doubt. Procter & Gamble bought Richardson-Vicks in 1985, the International Directory of Company Histories (2005) records, a purchase that brought it the Vicks, NyQuil and Oil of Olay brands; English Wikipedia says Pantene came with them, and, citing Davis Dyer’s P&G history Rising Tide (2004), that the deal let P&G compete in beauty products rather than only functional ones. Procter & Gamble has owned Pantene since 1985.

Under P&G the brand gained the name most shoppers know. The International Directory of Company Histories dates the introduction of Pantene Pro-V shampoo to 1992; English Wikipedia says Pro-V launched first in Taiwan in 1990 and in the United States and globally a year later, in what it describes as newly designed cylindrical bottles. P&G’s Philippine site says Pantene expanded rapidly in the early 1990s into markets including Australia, New Zealand, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Korea and Japan. The same page says that by the late 1990s Pantene had become a familiar name on fashion runways, naming Milan Fashion Week, Vogue and Cosmopolitan among its links to the fashion world; that too is the company’s own account.

The brand’s best-remembered line came before Pro-V. In 1986 the model and actress Kelly LeBrock appeared in a Pantene advert with the line “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” Cosmetics Business and Adweek reported in June 2019. English Wikipedia notes that the line drew criticism from feminist writers and became a catchphrase, and P&G’s own history page says it was seen as narcissistic at the time. In 2019 Pantene reworked it as “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m BeautifuLGBTQ+,” made in partnership with GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, as Cosmetics Business spelled out; Adweek said the agency was Grey New York and that the long-form film debuted at Cannes.

The look has been rebuilt more than once. The Irish beauty site Beaut.ie reported in January 2007 that Pantene had new bottles, colours and packaging for the new year, and FashionNetwork reported in June 2007 that the relaunch brought new packaging, new formulas and a new logo, arriving in France that September after Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all mass-market haircare names: TRESemmé, Pantene, Herbal Essences, Garnier Fructis, Aussie, Not Your Mother’s and John Frieda. Haircare brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from names that still carry a founder’s story to ranges that now belong to much larger consumer-goods groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner chemist to a supermarket aisle.

A haircare brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a name, a colour and the promise on the label, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its shampoos and conditioners are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Swiss name inside an American company.

Faces have long carried the brand. Beyond Kelly LeBrock, English Wikipedia, citing Harper’s Bazaar, says the mixed martial artist Ronda Rousey was named a Pantene ambassador in December 2016, and it lists Priyanka Chopra and Selena Gomez among the brand’s global ambassadors. P&G’s Philippine history page also says that in 2010 Pantene worked with NASA on modelling the molecular structure of hair, and that it set up a Pantene Hair Research Alliance in 2012; both are the company’s own account.

The name has travelled a long way from its source. A word coined from panthenol by a Basel drug company in 1945 now belongs to an American consumer-goods group, Procter & Gamble. The brand’s main site is pantene.com, with separate sites for countries such as pantene.com.ph in the Philippines.

For a design guide, Pantene shows how a name drawn from a chemical ingredient can outlast the pharmaceutical company that coined it, and how a single advertising line from 1986 can be revived for a new audience more than thirty years later. Compare TRESemmé, the American salon brand now owned by Unilever, and Herbal Essences, another mass-market haircare brand. For this guide we use Pro-V gold, bronze and pearl white with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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