Perspective: Permanent Waves

Successful advertising is often a case of improving on a formula that someone else—like it or not, usually another brand—came up with long before you. Swap out whatever details you want, but someone had to be the trailblazer. Case in point: selling women’s shampoo—or, more specifically, paying famous women to sell women’s shampoo to ordinary women. It’s a strategy that’s delivered the goods for over 60 years now, and the 1955 and 2011 ads on these pages show its smooth, unfaltering evolution.