culture
Vintage Toronto Ads: Get Rid of Dandruff Overnight? HA! HA! HA!
A medical professional scoffs at an alternate use for mouthwash.
Source: Canadian Home Journal, August 1950.
The good doctor couldn’t help but scoff. Day after day for 15 years he had holed up in his home laboratory on a quest to discover a speedy solution for dandruff sufferers. He knew that Listerine had made many claims about its wonder powers over the years, from masking body odour to killing mouth germs. To him, the antiseptic liquid’s advertisements were little more than 19th-century medicine-show hyperbole. Friends who saw its possibilities as a dandruff home remedy disagreed, but they also thought he’d spent too many hours hunched over the microscope.
In the end, our incredulous doctor was approached by Procter and Gamble to work on a top-secret dandruff-shampoo project that promised to be head and shoulders above any other product on the market.