A cream, a roll-on and a spray for women.

Secret has been part of the Procter & Gamble portfolio since the 1950s, and from its first product it was aimed at women. The company’s own brand history, cited by English Wikipedia, says P&G began research on the product in 1945 and introduced Secret in 1956 as a cream applied by hand. Secret’s website today puts the same date at the centre of its story, saying the brand has been helping women “since 1956.”

The formats changed quickly. According to that company history as summarised by Wikipedia, Secret added a roll-on in 1958 and a spray in 1964, followed by a round solid stick in 1978. In the 1980s, the same account says, the stick was reshaped from round to wide, a change P&G explained as a better fit for a woman’s underarm, and three named scents, Powder Fresh, Spring Breeze and Sporty Clean, were introduced to give buyers a choice of fragrance. The same history, as Wikipedia summarises it, describes the brand’s early product work as guided by the view that men and women may have different needs, and that women should not have to accept a weaker product as a result — the thinking that the brand’s best-known slogan would later put into words.

Through these years Secret was defined less by a package than by a sentence. Wikipedia, drawing on the brand’s history, says the slogan “Strong Enough for a Man, Made for a Woman” was developed in 1972. Its author was the copywriter Carol H. Williams, who, Wikipedia notes, was later inducted into the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame.

The slogan survives in the archives as well as in memory. The Duke University Libraries exhibit collection holds an advertisement titled “Secret antiperspirant is strong enough for a man but made for a woman,” credited to Carol H. Williams for Procter & Gamble and dated 7 August 1978. It is catalogued in the library’s J. Walter Thompson competitive-advertisements files for 1978, so the line was in use in Secret’s print advertising that year.

One brand for women inside a portfolio of men’s names.

Secret’s place in Procter & Gamble is defined by contrast. English Wikipedia describes it as P&G’s women’s antiperspirant and deodorant brand, which also includes the men’s brands Gillette and Old Spice, and says it is sold in the United States, Canada and Mexico, through supermarkets, drug stores, mass merchandisers and online retailers. The copyright line on secret.com today reads Procter & Gamble.

The product range kept widening after the slogan years. Wikipedia’s account of the brand, again drawing on the company history, lists the Ultra Dry and Sheer Dry lines of the 1990s and Platinum in 1999; new scents named Ambitious, Genuine and Optimism from 2001; a clear gel and an invisible solid in 2002; and Secret Clinical Strength in 2007. In 2009, it says, the brand launched Scent Expressions, a line organised around fragrance, and in 2019 a collection called Secret with Essential Oils.

Marketing moved from the slogan toward sport. Wikipedia records that in 2010 Secret was among the brands in P&G’s sponsorship of the Winter Olympics, appearing in the “Thank you Mom” campaign with skaters and skiers and their mothers, and that the brand ran an online campaign called “Let Her Jump” in support of women’s ski jumping becoming an Olympic sport. In 2019 Secret began a partnership with the U.S. women’s national soccer team and Wikipedia says the brand was named the official deodorant of Team USA for the 2024 Summer Olympics, the year rugby player Ilona Maher became a brand ambassador.

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 one-word name and a 1970s headline.

Secret’s identity rests on two pieces of language. The first is the name, a single everyday word, used without change since the cream of 1956, through the roll-on of 1958, the spray of 1964 and the stick of 1978. The second is the 1970s headline. “Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman” was written by Carol H. Williams and, as the 1978 entry in the Duke University Libraries archive shows, served as the title of a Secret advertisement that year.

The later product names, as listed in Wikipedia’s history of the brand, pair the one-word name with a qualifier: Secret Platinum in 1999, Secret Clinical Strength in 2007, Secret Scent Expressions in 2009 and Secret with Essential Oils in 2019. Scents were given names too, from Powder Fresh, Spring Breeze and Sporty Clean in the 1980s to Ambitious, Genuine and Optimism in 2001.

The later marketing turned that language toward athletes. The 2010 Olympic campaign, the 2019 partnership with the U.S. women’s national soccer team and the Team USA role in 2024 all placed the brand beside women athletes, and Wikipedia records the brand’s description of itself in recent years with the tagline “Stress Tested for Women.”

For a design guide, Secret shows how a one-word name and one well-built sentence can carry a brand for decades, with formats and scent names changing around a fixed core. Compare it with its Procter & Gamble stablemate Old Spice, and with Ivory, the P&G soap whose slogans also became part of its identity. For this guide we use a rose, plum and powder palette with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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