Crazy Salad (10 page)

March, 1973

Leonard Lavin simply does not understand what all this is about.

Leonard Lavin is the kind of man who believes, almost to the point of religious fervor, in the free-enterprise system. In capitalism. In advertising. In this great land of ours. When Leonard Lavin sits in his Melrose Park, Illinois, factory, in the shade of a 75-foot-high can of Alberto VO5 hair spray, he knows that what he surveys is not just good but positive proof that America works. In less than twenty years, he has taken Alberto-Culver, a piddling drug company with sales of $300,000 a year, and brought it to its current yearly volume of $182 million. Leonard Lavin is proud of this, proud of every bit of it, and one of the things he is proudest of is the fact that there is a product on the market, a product that did not exist seven years ago and probably would not exist today but for him, and that product is going to gross over $40 million this year. Forty million dollars a year added on to the gross national product. Leonard Lavin deserves a medal for that. Right? And what he is getting instead is flak.

Leonard Lavin simply does not understand.

—

I will try to keep this from becoming gamy, but it is going to be hard. This is an article about the feminine-hygiene spray, and how it was developed and sold. I will try to keep it witty and charming, but inevitably something is going to sneak in to remind you what this product is really about. This product is really about vaginal odor. There are a lot of advertisements on television for the product that are so subtle on this point that some people—maybe not
you
, but some people—might not even know what the product
does
. There are a lot of men who manufacture the product who are so reluctant to talk straight about it that you can spend hours with them and not hear one anatomical phrase. They speak of “the problem.” They speak of “the area where the problem exists.” They speak of “the need to solve the problem.” Every so often, a hard-core word slides into the conversation. Vagina, maybe. Or sometimes, from someone particularly candid or scientific, a vulva or two. But mostly, the discussion of this product from industry spokesmen is vague, elusive, euphemistic. Here, for example, are the words of Larry Foster, a public-relations man for Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of Vespré and Naturally Feminine. He is speaking here of feminine-hygiene sprays and cunnilingus; I tell you this for the simple reason that he does not.

“What we’re talking about here,” said Foster, “is first, sex, and second, that segment of sex and how you react to it. Whether or not one needs something like this …” He paused. “If you were to really get people honest in terms of their reaction, the reaction is not with the product but with deep-seated feelings, not about sex but that segment of sex.” Another pause. “In terms of body odor, feminine odor, in terms of that, each man would give you a difference of opinion, ranging from acceptance of it or disdain of it. Some people would consider it a problem. Others would say,
‘What the hell’s the difference whether you spray or not?’ I don’t know why I wax eloquent, but I do think everyone’s missing the point.”

All this vagueness and euphemism is entirely appropriate, of course, since the name of the product itself is a total euphemism. The feminine-hygiene spray is the term coined by the industry for a deodorant for the external genital area (or, more exactly, the external perineal area). The product has been attacked continuously since its introduction in 1966—by women’s liberationists, who think it is demeaning to women; by consumerists, who think it is unnecessary; and by medical doctors, who think it is dangerous. In spite of the widely shared belief among these groups that the product is perhaps
the
classic example of a bad idea whose time has come, and in spite of the product’s well-publicized involvement in the recent hexachlorophene flap, the feminine-hygiene spray appears to be here to stay. It is currently being manufactured by more than twenty companies (one industry source claims to have seen some forty different brands) and being used by over twenty million women, and this, according to those in the industry, is just the beginning. Says Steve Bray, who is in charge of Pristeen at Warner-Lambert Company: “It will be as common as toothpaste.”

In a time when the young are popularly assumed to be, if not the great unwashed, at least free from the older generation’s absurd hang-ups about odors, the sprays are selling most briskly to teen-agers and women in their early twenties. “Secretaries and stewardesses,” says the clerk at Manhattan’s Beekhill Chemists, which cannot keep the products in stock and which has been having a run of late on a corollary product, the raspberry douche called Cupid’s Quiver. Secretaries and stewardesses. It figures. Scratch any trend no one you know is into and you will always find secretaries and stewardesses. They are also behind Dr. David Reuben,
contemporary cards,
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
, water beds, Cold Duck, Rod McKuen, and Minute Rice.

“American women are pushovers for this product,” says Dr. Norman Pleshette, a New York gynecologist. “I think it comes down to menstruation, which many are taught is unclean. There are euphemisms for it, like The Curse. This is something instilled in women from girlhood on.” Adds Dr. Sheldon H. Cherry, another New York gynecologist: “It’s capitalizing on a small minority of women’s fears and sensitivities about odors in this area. The average woman certainly does not need the routine use of a feminine deodorant. And women who do have odors should see a gynecologist to see if there is a pathological cause.”

The success of the feminine-hygiene spray provides a fascinating paradox in that its manufacturers have taken advantage of the sexual revolution to sell something that conveys an implicit message that sex—in the natural state, at least—is dirty and smelly. To make matters more complicated, these same manufacturers are oblivious to the paradox: in their eyes, the mere fact that the sprays are being marketed is a breakthrough, a step forward in the realm of sexual freedom, a solid thrust in the never-ending fight against hypocrisy and puritanism. We didn’t invent the problem, they say. It has always been there. The feminine-hygiene spray has just come along to save the day. “Somewhere out there,” says Jerry Della Femina, whose advertising agency did the campaigns for Feminique, “there is a girl who might be hung up about herself, and one day she goes out and buys Feminique and shoots up with it, and she comes home and that one night she feels more confident and she jumps her husband and for the first time in her life she has an orgasm. If I can feel I was responsible for one more orgasm in the world, I feel I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.”

H
OW
A
LBERTO-
C
ULVER
T
ESTS
FDS
FOR
E
FFECTIVENESS
(A S
HORT BUT
G
AMY
S
ECTION
)

A housewife comes to the Institute for Applied Pharmaceutical Research in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, on a Monday morning, at which time she is evaluated by direct olfaction on a scale of eight. What this means, in plain language, is that she simply takes off her clothes, lies down on a bed with a curtain and sheet completely covering the upper half of her body, and a judge takes a nosepiece, places it over her vulvar area, and sniffs. The judge is female, earns up to $1,000 a week, and works also in underarm odor. The housewife is scored: from 0 to 2 means little or no odor; 3–4 denotes a detectable odor though one that is of no concern to the subject; 5–6 is strong odor; and 7–8 is ripe. After the first evaluation, the housewife takes a bath using only soap and water. Six, twelve, and twenty-four hours later, she is sniffed by the judge and evaluated. On Tuesday, the process is repeated. Wednesday and Thursday, she is sprayed with FDS after bathing and the evaluation proceeds. During the four-day period, the housewife sleeps at home but is not allowed to have intercourse. She receives $150 for four days of work. According to the Institute, the test shows that FDS reduces feminine odor more effectively than soap and water—by 74–78 percent after six hours, 53–59 percent after twelve hours, and 38–40 percent after twenty-four hours.

—

The first feminine-hygiene spray was a Swiss product called Bidex, which was introduced by Medelline in Europe in the early 1960s. Technologically, the product was a step forward: until that point, all sprays had been the wet, sticky variety; the Swiss were the first to use a propellant called fluorocarbon 12 to produce a warm, dry spray. The American rights to Bidex were purchased by Warner-Lambert,
which imported it and put it into a small test market under its original name. At the same time, Leonard Lavin, president of Alberto-Culver, saw Bidex during a 1965 trip through Europe, and he brought the concept back to his company and summoned his chief scientist, John A. Cella. Before coming to Alberto-Culver, Cella was part of the original research team on the birth-control pill at G. D. Searle; once, while working with the raw estrogen used in Enovid, he sprouted a pair of breasts. They were only temporary. Cella is a good-natured man who seems to be thoroughly used to the enthusiasms of his boss; still, he admits that the idea of feminine sprays threw him a little. “We were all a little nonplused about it,” he recalled. “Oh, well. They never look to me for marketing decisions. Mr. Lavin came back from Switzerland and said, ‘This thing will go. Can we do it?’ I said, ‘I think we can do it.’ We had some background research on this going back to 1963 in the general deodorant field, in terms of what you could deodorize. It was a toiletry, but we were going to treat it as a pharmaceutical—we realized because of the area in which it was to be used it would have to have safety experiments. It is a grooming product, not a pharmaceutical, but it was a breakthrough.”

In terms of product development, the feminine-hygiene spray was not a breakthrough at all. It followed right along in the tradition of mouthwashes and underarm deodorants and foot sprays, a tradition Ralph Nader has called the why-wash-it-when-you-can-spray-it ethic. What the manufacturers of all these products have succeeded at over the years, as economist John Kenneth Galbraith points out, is in manufacturing and creating the demand for a product at the same time they manufacture and create the product. In the area of personal grooming, the new product is considerably easier to introduce than in other fields. “Year after year,” says Ralph Nader, “in any industry, the sellers become very acute in appealing
to those features of a human personality that are easiest to exploit. Everyone knows what they are. It’s easiest to exploit a person’s sense of fear, a person’s sense of being ugly, a person’s sense of smelling badly, than it is to exploit a person’s appraisal or appreciation of nutrition, and, shall we say, less emotive and more rational consumer value.”

The underarm deodorant, which was the first product to capitalize on the American mania for odor suppression, was introduced over a hundred years ago, in 1870. A few years later, Mum, the first trademark brand, came onto the market. It had a primitive formula of wax which was intended to stop perspiration by simply plugging pores. In 1914, Odo-Ro-No, with a base of aluminum chloride, became the first nationally advertised brand, and it was followed by dozens of products containing metal-salts bases, which did control perspiration though they were less successful in controlling odor. The big deodorant boom came in the late 1940s, when the less than euphonious term “B.O.” was coined, and in the 1950s, when hexachlorophene came onto the market. This drug, which its manufacturers claim inhibits the growth of microorganisms on skin surfaces and thus prevents odors, was discovered in 1939 by a scientist named Dr. William Gump and became the sole property of the New York–based Givaudan Corporation, which sold it by the trainload to the manufacturers of Dial Soap, pHisoHex (the soap used in hospitals by doctors and nurses before surgery), and a wide variety of deodorant products. In the 1960s, the introduction of the aerosol container clinched hexachlorophene’s domination of deodorant formulas for the reason that alternative agents, like aluminum salts, could not be used in metal cans. Right Guard, and other “family-type” products, zoomed to the top of sales charts. At the same time, the mouthwash manufacturers introduced pocket-sized spray atomizers, and the first foot-spray powders came onto
the market. The American woman had been convinced to spray her mouth, her underarms, and her feet; the feminine-hygiene spray, at this point, was probably inevitable.

—advertisement for Feminique

Dorothy Provine, in this case, happens to be right. Women
have
come a long way since the horrible days when women were ashamed of feeling like women. To be exact, women have come full circle. Leonard Lavin is fond of reminding his critics that the tradition for the feminine-hygiene spray goes back to Biblical times; he is absolutely accurate; and he is furthermore totally unaware that he is basing his defense of his product on thoroughly primitive practices, purification rites that originated from physiological ignorance and superstition and that were instrumental in the early forms of discrimination against women. Says Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, editor of the
Reconstructionist
magazine: “To take an ancient concept and apply it to a modern one, especially for commercial purposes, to tie it in with exalted notions, is pure exploitation and misleading.”