A Hollywood hairdressing and the company named after its chemist.

VO5 began as one product in a long catalogue. The Chicago Tribune, profiling the Alberto-Culver Company on 24 February 1986, described its origin as “no more than a small beauty supply” business in Los Angeles, owned by Blaine Culver. Its products included a hairdressing that, according to the newspaper, was created by the company’s chemist, “known only as Alberto”, after a Hollywood studio hairstylist asked for something to stop hair drying out under hot studio lights. It was made, the Tribune said, of five vital oils — the source of the letters VO5 — and it first found its users by glossing the hair of actors and actresses.

The company told the same story about itself. An “Our Story: Brands” page that Alberto-Culver published on its website, archived in June 2008, says the product was developed by a West Coast beauty supply house and, without any advertising, found favour among retail customers and among stylists at Hollywood studios, who used it against the drying caused by sun or klieg lights. The page calls the story of Alberto VO5 Conditioning Hairdressing the history of the company in microcosm.

That history turned in 1955. The Encyclopedia of Chicago, published by the Chicago Historical Society, says that in that year Leonard and Bernice Lavin bought Alberto-Culver from Blaine Culver and moved it from Los Angeles to Chicago. Leonard Lavin, a manufacturer’s representative who had sold toiletries for other companies, told the Tribune in 1986 that of the products the business was making, only the hairdressing impressed him, because it was doing well without any real advertising. He added that the chemist Alberto was not an owner of the firm when he bought it.

The Lavins kept the name and narrowed the line. Alberto-Culver’s 2008 account says Leonard Lavin discontinued the rest of the line to focus on Alberto VO5 Hairdressing, and that the new company began with Leonard and Bernice Lavin, a handful of managers and a small production line. “I moved the company back to Chicago and decided to keep the original name,” Lavin told the Tribune, explaining that in hair care, word of mouth and credibility came from the professionals who used a product in salons and barber shops. Bernice Lavin became vice president and secretary-treasurer of the company.

From a Chicago start-up to two owners on two continents.

Television carried the brand out of Hollywood. Lavin said he introduced consumers to VO5 through television and print advertising as soon as the company reached Chicago, and Alberto-Culver’s 2008 account says the Lavins built the business by pouring every spare dollar into television advertising. The Tribune says the company moved to larger premises in Melrose Park, outside Chicago, at the start of the 1960s, and went public in 1961; the Encyclopedia of Chicago dates the new Melrose Park plant and headquarters to 1960. The company says the Lavins guided its growth until 1994, when they handed it to the next generation of the family.

The VO5 name grew with the company. Alberto-Culver said in 2008 that the Alberto VO5 name had been expanded into major lines of shampoo, conditioner, treatment and styling products, alongside the company’s other hair-care brands, including TRESemmé and Nexxus. The word “Alberto” stayed in the full name of the original hairdressing, a reminder of the chemist who, by the company’s own account, devised it.

The brand was divided when Alberto-Culver was sold. Unilever announced in September 2010 that it would buy Alberto-Culver, and on 24 August 2011 The New York Times DealBook reported that, to satisfy conditions set by the US Justice Department, Unilever had agreed to sell the Alberto VO5 brand in the United States and Puerto Rico, and the Rave brand worldwide, to Brynwood Partners, a private equity firm in Greenwich, Connecticut. Unilever kept Alberto VO5 everywhere else. English Wikipedia says the US rights to VO5, Rave and Coast went to High Ridge Brands.

Both halves have since changed hands again. The address highridgebrands.com now leads to the website of Sodalis USA, of Westport, Connecticut, which lists Alberto VO5 and Rave among its hair-care brands. Outside the United States, Wikipedia says Unilever placed VO5 in Elida Beauty, a standalone business for older brands, in April 2021; Reuters reported on 18 December 2023 that Unilever would sell Elida Beauty to the private equity firm Yellow Wood Partners, and the British VO5 website now carries an Elida Beauty copyright line.

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 chemist’s first name and a formula code.

VO5’s name is a compact piece of copywriting. As the Chicago Tribune explained it in 1986, the letters stand for the five vital oils in the original hairdressing, and the word placed in front of them is the first name of the chemist who made it. The company kept both: the product was sold for decades as Alberto VO5, and Leonard Lavin told the newspaper that he decided to keep the original company name when he moved the business to Chicago. The result was a brand that carried a person’s name and a code side by side, with the code doing the explaining.

Alberto-Culver leaned on the Alberto name in its advertising. The Tribune’s 1986 profile opened with “Ooh Alberto!”, a phrase an advertising company wrote for the company’s European Mousse Styling Foam. The Hollywood origin also stayed part of the story: both the newspaper and the company’s 2008 account trace the hairdressing to a studio stylist and to hair dried out by bright film lights, which gave a practical product a showbusiness back story.

The split of 2011 left the name in two forms. In the United States, where Sodalis USA now lists the brand, it appears as Alberto VO5, the full original name. In Britain, the VO5 website — the vo5.com address redirects there — uses the short form VO5 and presents the brand as a styling and hair-care range, with Elida Beauty named in its copyright line. Two companies on two sides of the Atlantic now manage separate identities under the same three characters.

The British owner has itself changed shape. PE Hub reported on 20 January 2026 that Yellow Wood-backed Suave Brands and Elida Beauty had merged to form Evermark, bringing the VO5 business outside the United States into the same group as Suave in North America.

For a design guide, VO5 shows how a name built from a chemist and a formula code can outlast the company that coined it, splitting into a long American form and a short British one. Compare it with TRESemmé, another Alberto-Culver hair-care brand that passed to Unilever, and Suave. For this guide we use studio claret and klieg gold on pomade cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep VO5’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.