Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Noxzema (1950)


Good morning! Once again schoolwork is getting in the way of the frantic pace at which I publish these little blogposts. The NERVE! I only have a minute before I need to go back to the educational theory mines and come up with a couple more nuggets of wisdom for my Content Area Reading course (blech! blech! and blech! Don't they know I would rather be doing...anything else?), but in that minute I wanted to tell you about post-sunburn-care. I ran across this ad (and then subsequent ones from the same year) in a Life magazine and wanted to show you how Noxzema advertised its wares in the year of our Lord 1950.


Do we LOVE the colors in this ad or do we L-O-V-E the colors in this ad? The avocado green of her swimsuit, the boy-scout-esque pocket flaps, the goldenrod yellow of her hair...everything looks SO. SUMMER. As much as I hate to think of my skin someday resembling the color and consistency of Hoggle's due to my lack of vigilance as far as sun protection goes, I do love to get a little color in the summer. What are your thoughts on tanning? I've only been to a professional tanning bed twice, in college, and I wasn't super impressed with the process. My sister, my dad and I are all pretty much natural tanners, who brown up in the summer without laying out just from yard work, walkabouts, and short sleeves. We always do some kind of sunscreen but we always end up tanning. Lately, hearing about "tan mom" type stuff on the news, I wonder if I should eschew my casual sunning ways and wear sunhats, carry parasols, do all those things super fair-skinned people do to block out the sun.


LOOK! AT! THIS! AD! Not only does it look like the cover of some pot boiler detective paperback from the fifties', it uses one of my favorite, usable-in-real-life lines from Shakespeare. "Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep!", is something I say to Babu all the time when I drank eight too many diet Cokes and I can't freaking get back to bed in the middle of the night...and here it is again in this MCM ad! We love it! I think the girl looks more hungover than worried about the bizarrely jaundiced, non-sunburned sections of her body, but maybe there's a combination of factors there. Do you think it's the same girl from the first ad, later that night?


Last but not least, this saucy little number is the third ad I could find with Noxzema's sunburn relief as its main subject. You think that Irene Dunne lookalike is showing enough skin! Jeepers! I know it's a sunburn ad, but it seems a little excessive, especially considering the pained, haggard expression on her face takes this ad waaaay out of the glamorous, sexy category under which the level of cleavage shown would usually fall. Someone take my retroactive advice and put the blonde back in! So we can all get a good night's sleep, sunburn or no! That woman is scaring me.

Gotta jet. How's your summer shaping up so far? Any notable sunburns or occasions-to-be-sunburned? I'm hoping to make it up to Holiday World in Indiana before long...I'll make sure and heed Noxzema's stern warnings before I go!

Have a great Tuesday...get hype about Independence Day tomorrow! :)

11 comments:

  1. Wow, noxzema noxzema? Id think it would hurt to put it on a sunburn! Have to try that! I know its bad for you but I look one billion times better with a little bit of color. It fades too fast though, I always envy people who turn brown. I usually look like the lady in the murders sleep ad

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    1. Ha ha, doesn't just thinking about the red skinned burn in the murders sleep ad make your skin crawl a little! I've used Solarcaine before one time when I atypically got SUPER burnt at some kind of outdoors event, but next time, I'm trying the old school Noxzema stuff.

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  2. Oh, you know I have to chime in on this. I was a sun worshipper in the 70's. We thought SPF was counterintuitive. Hawaiian Tropic was the oil of choice..SPF nought. (I can actually time travel smelling it) I was laying out in the front yard when I heard about Elvis' demise on my little transistor radio...112 degrees that day in BFE, Missouri. I was caramelly, caramelly brown. I had a big fake tiger lilly I used to put in my hair to go out to ravish the boys in their polyester shirts. Bliss! However....Today I happened to put my makeup on in a different location than usual. The light was better. I noticed what looks like a skin cancer on my nose. Yep, I've seen a thousand, thousand of them on patients.. It is in a prime spot for a fashionable biopsy and skin graft. So...just don't do it. Wear the hat, the SPF 50. Pay now, pretty later.

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    1. I'm sorry to hear about your nose. With mine sticking out from my head as far as it does, it's THE FIRST place I put sunscreen on the occasions that I do. Otherwise I end up looking like W.C. Fields. As always, though, I love your vignette about poor deceased Elvis and suntanning and tiger lily hair accessories. You really should think about starting your own blog, I'd read it every day!

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  3. ugh, i get sunburn just sitting in the car! it makes me wince just to think of sun burns pasta! i've only gotten one little one this summer so far, knock on wood!

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    1. Wood knocked. I got some crazy, top of back burn from that dress you admired in the New Orleans pictures on that very day the pictures were taken! It's faded to a tan now, but it's bizarre when I wear anything cut lower on the back (which is like, everything I own, the back-of-neckline was strange on that dress!) that I have this very noticeable top of back line. Le sigh.

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  4. As a small child while visiting my cousins in Indianapolis, I received a really bad sunburn while swimming – my back looked like a cooked lobster! Later that evening before going to bed, my Aunt put Noxzema on burnt areas, which actually helped cool the burn enough so I could sleep. I have to wonder if she got the idea from advertisements like these ?

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    1. It's funny because as I was doing this post, I kept thinking they were advertising a special kind of sunburn treatment made by Noxzema...and with you guys' comments and further reflection, I now realize it's ACTUALLY NOXZEMA! The same concrete-y skin treatment you'd slather on your face in the pre-teen years! Crazy. It's neat to hear a "from the field" experience of the healing powers of Noxzema, Floyd, thanks!

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  5. I remember getting burns like that and the feel of the cool Noxzema - it felt soooo good!!

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  6. Thankfully, I haven't had too many sunburns (although I got my first in about a decade earlier this year--boo) because I'm very pale, so I burn and then I just go right back to being pale! No tan for me. I try to get a little bit of un-SPFed sun exposure so I can get some vitamin D and whatnot, though, but mostly I don't even go out of the house! It's too hot right now, anyway.

    These ads are quite risqué, especially the last one! I'm a bit surprised they ran in Life in the 50s. I, too, am a bit concerned about the jaundiced tinge of the first model's skin. Eeek. Maybe it's just from the printing process? (We can only hope.)

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  7. I haven't had a sunburn like that since I was a kid! My mom used to use Noxema on our burns and it would really soothe the burn....but didn't really stop the skin peeling....ick!

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