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In today’s ad, we see the influence of the “British Invasion”. I think people generally apply that term to music, but fashion, movies, and even cosmetics looked to Britain after the smashing success of the Beatles’ 1964 US appearances.
Yardley of London is considered to be the oldest cosmetics company in the world, having been established in 1770. In the 1950s Yardley ran ads in American magazines that featured a slightly creepy (my opinion; creepy is in the eye of the beholder) Madame Alexander doll, holding a bottle of lavender fragrance. It was a very old fashioned image.
Sometime in the mid 1960s some very smart persons at Yardley decided to cash in on the British craze. The result was a line of products marketed to teens that were centered around a London Look theme. The packaging was colorful, the colors the latest in fashion, and the advertising fun. There were even TV ads that were placed on shows like The Monkees that had a teen audience.
They managed to get one of the most recognisable faces of the London Look, Jean Shrimpton, to model the print ads. Yardley went from being the brand of grannies to the brand that gave a bit of London cool to girls everywhere.
After all the talk about Ringo in yesterday’s post, I could not help but notice that this lipstick was named the SlickeRINGO.
The Vintage Traveler 
I remember receiving my first Yardley” Lip Slicks” for my 13th birthday!
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Haha! That’s so cool the lipstick was called SlickeRINGO!
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I have one of those eye shadow pots! It was my aunt’s in the 60s and somehow came into my hands. It’s SO awesome to see the ad for it!
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some old ads can be really cool! i took out some 60s-70s ads from old magazines, framed them and hanged in my flat 🙂
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Just yesterday I was thinking about Yardley cosmetics! They did a really superb job of targeting the young woman’s market with such things as wet-or-dry eyeshadows (if you applied them with a brush and water, they lasted all day and didn’t cake in the eye crease) and very pale, and even white, lipstick. I remember seeing girls on the school bus applying white lipstick before applying their fashion color, so that their super-pale pink or beige/flesh-colored lipstick wouldn’t be darkened by normal lip color underneath. The idea was to minimize the mouth so that your eyes got all the attention — the ideal was the ‘startled doe’ look (see above.) I suspect that girls liked that “innocent” look more than boys did.
Jean Shrimpton was so beautiful that even 1960s eye makeup doesn’t make her look silly — at least, when I was giving my makeup class a slide lecture on changing standards of facial beauty, I showed a slide of “The Shrimp” and one young man said, “Wait! Stop! Go back! WHO is that?”
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Hmm, I thought Yardley made only perfumes!
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I’m pretty sure that is how they got started. Today, I associate the name with lavender soap.
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Pingback: Ad Campaign – Yardley, 1968 | The Vintage Traveler
Yardley has such a wide range of great beauty products and I’m a huge fan of their fragrances… Speaking abwt ads. I’m a marketing student and as a yardley fan I’d love to work with their ads. Team, how is this possible???
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I have been searching for the magazine which featured this Slickeringo ad for years. Can anyone tell me which magazine this is in? If the page size is 11 x 13, then it’s probably Seventeen. Any help appreciated, thanks!
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Yes, it was in Seventeen.
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I remember this lipstick. When I was eleven I wore my mother down by asking for this product; it was called “City Slicker” and there was a whistle at the other end of the lipstick. I guess she thought purchasing this in a very pale color couldn’t do too much damage. Jean Shrimpton was the most gorgeous model of all time.
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