The Medicated Face: Cover Girl and the Young Customer

In January 1961 a Baltimore company known for a medicated skin cream put its first makeup on national sale: a liquid makeup and a compressed powder, launched with magazine and television advertising aimed at teenagers and young women.^[1] It was not sold where makeup was usually sold. It went on the shelves of drug and grocery stores, beside the company’s other products, while its rivals sold theirs at department-store counters.^[1][2]

The name did two jobs at once. A cover girl was a model on a magazine; Cover Girl was also something that covered a blemish.^[2]

Noxzema began as a pharmacist’s cream. George Bunting mixed it by hand in his Baltimore drugstore from clove oil, eucalyptus oil, lime water, menthol and camphor, and the Noxzema Chemical Company was formed in 1917.^[3] By the late 1950s the firm was looking for new lines, and one proposal was a makeup carrying the same medicated claims as the cream.^[3][4]

Who proposed it is told two ways. The Smithsonian’s finding aid for the Cover Girl advertising archive credits Bill Hunt, who ran product development at Noxzema;^[3] James Bennett, the historian of the industry whose work this account relies on, thinks the idea may have come from Mary Ayers of the advertising agency Sullivan, Stauffer, Colwell & Bayles, and notes that others credit Hunt.^[4] The names tried before the final one — Thera-Blem and Blema-Glow among them — show which half of the idea came first.^[3]

Cover Girl was formulated with some of the compounds already in Noxzema Skin Cream — camphor, menthol, clove oil and eucalyptus oil — and with three bactericides: two parahydroxybenzoates, the preservatives now called parabens, and hexachlorophene.^[5] Because bacteria were associated with pimples, the additions let Noxzema claim that Cover Girl was “really good for the skin” and “better than not using make-up at all”.^[5]

The advertising split the promise in two. According to the finding aid, the glamour advertisements went to women’s magazines while the medicated claims were kept for teen magazines, and television carried both.^[6] By 1962 Cover Girl’s sales were well over half the all-time record of Noxzema Skin Cream itself.^[5]

The advertising borrowed its authority from the magazines themselves. The agency arranged to use the mastheads of titles such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour and Life in Cover Girl advertisements; pressure from other cosmetics houses, Revlon among them, made many of the magazines withdraw within a year or two, but by then the brand was established.^[7]

The campaign is sometimes credited with starting the trend for named models in advertising that produced the supermodel. Bennett calls that overstated, while allowing that Cover Girl was the first brand to use identified models widely across print, radio and television, which turned many of them into household names.^[7]

The accounts disagree about the audience. Bennett, working from Noxzema’s annual reports, describes a campaign aimed at teenagers and young women and a product packaged for the drug and grocery stores where price-sensitive young buyers shopped; from 1962 the company ran Co-Ed High School Cover Girl contests, the first won by a seventeen-year-old.^[8] The Smithsonian finding aid gives the target as women between eighteen and fifty-four.^[9] Both can be true of a brand that sold glamour in one magazine and medicine in another.

The range was narrow in another sense. It launched in three shades — Light, Medium and Dark, the last soon renamed Brunette — and by 1964 had four, which in Bennett’s judgement still left it suitable only for lighter skins.^[8] The finding aid records advertising that featured “especially Caucasian women” until the 1980s.^[9]

Success brought imitators. Revlon, which by its historian’s account was poorly represented among young buyers, launched Natural Wonder in 1962: an economy line, medicated with hexachlorophene like Cover Girl, sold as a liquid, a matte makeup and a pressed powder, in seven shades that became ten by 1964.^[11] Max Factor and Chesebrough-Pond’s added medicated ranges too.^[12] Max Factor’s was Pure Magic, and its liquid makeup carried the same antiseptic.^[13]

None of them stopped the original. By 1968 Cover Girl Liquid Make-up was the top-selling makeup line in the United States, with Cover Girl Pressed Powder second, and the line had added lipsticks in 1964 — eight shades, with frosted ones from 1966.^[12]

The medicine was the part that did not last. Hexachlorophene had been used widely and studied little; it was thought too insoluble to be absorbed. By the 1970s studies suggested that it was absorbed and could affect the nervous system, and after infants in France died from a talcum powder made in error with six per cent of it, the Food and Drug Administration in 1972 recalled consumer products containing more than 0.75 per cent.^[14]

Noxzema, by then renamed the Noxell Corporation, had already taken it out of Cover Girl earlier that year. The makeup still contained other bactericides, so it could still be called medicated.^[15] And the advertising had found a new word for the same promise: from 1968, by Bennett’s dating, Cover Girl was sold as “Clean Makeup”.^[15]

The sources disagree on who had the idea, on whom the makeup was meant for, and on when the clean makeup campaign began: Bennett dates its first advertisement to 1968, the Smithsonian finding aid places the campaign in the 1970s.^[16][17] The finding aid is itself the record of a project the Noxell Corporation helped to pay for, which is worth knowing when it describes the campaign’s success.^[17]

Cover Girl is often said to have taken makeup out of the department store. Neither source used here calls it the first makeup sold in grocery stores, and this account does not; they say only that it was sold there, unlike its prestige rivals. Nor do they show whether the medicated makeup did anything for the skin of the people who wore it. What they record is what it was advertised to do.