We didn’t have a skincare routine, a hair routine, or a “wellness” anything. We had a bathroom cabinet and a cabinet under the sink, both full of products doing jobs the FDA would probably like a word about today. What we didn’t have, at the time, was any idea where any of it came from, who invented it, or why. So here’s the backstory behind the stuff, plus a reminder of what it was actually like to use.

Generation Jones (born 1954 to 1965, per the term coined by social commentator Jonathan Pontell) came of age in the 1970s, a decade that happened to be a golden age for drugstore chemistry, door-to-door salesmen turned tycoons, and marketing campaigns built entirely around a slogan and a bottle shaped like a buoy. None of these products were designed with us specifically in mind. Most of them were decades old by the time we got to them. We just happened to be the generation using them at full volume.

The Iconic Smells of Generation Jones

Scientists say smell is the sense most tied to memory, and there’s an actual mechanism behind that: unlike sight or sound, smell runs almost directly into the hippocampus and amygdala, the brain’s memory and emotion centers, without much of a detour. Neuroscientists have a name for it, the Proust phenomenon, after the French novelist who spent seven volumes on the memories unlocked by a cookie. We had the same effect, minus the seven volumes.

Walk into school on a Friday morning and the teacher hands you a quiz fresh off the mimeograph machine. Still warm. That chemical smell hit you before the questions did. Nobody questioned it. Nobody questioned anything back then. Add chalk dust, pencil shavings, and the paste in the little jar with the spreader attached to the lid, the one that smelled vaguely minty and that someone in every class definitely ate. Then the cafeteria, which had its own category of smell entirely: steam tables, industrial cleaner, and whatever they called pizza on Fridays. You knew the day of the week by what hit you in the hallway.

We didn’t have aromatherapy. We had this, plus everything below, which is where the rest of the smells came from.

Skincare: Noxzema, Sea Breeze, & No Moisturizer

We didn’t have a ten-step routine. We had four products, a bathroom mirror, and absolutely no idea what we were doing. It worked out fine.

Noxzema started in 1914, when a Baltimore pharmacist named George Bunting mixed a medicated skin cream in the back of his drugstore and sold it as a sunburn remedy. A customer reportedly told him it had “knocked out” her eczema. Bunting heard a better name than “Bunting’s Sunburn Remedy” and rebranded on the spot. By the time it reached our bathroom cabinets six decades later, none of that history survived the trip. We just knew the blue jar, the tingle, and the assumption that the tingle meant it was working.

Pond’s has an even longer resume. Theron T. Pond patented a witch hazel extract in Utica, New York, in 1846, marketed as a cure for cuts and scrapes. It took until 1905 for the company to introduce Pond’s Cold Cream specifically, which became a minor sensation for a very unglamorous reason: it didn’t need to be refrigerated, unlike most creams of the era. Oil of Olay has a stranger origin story still. A South African chemist named Graham Wulff invented it in 1952, named it as a play on “lanolin,” and marketed it without ever specifying what it actually did, since the label never once used the word moisturizer. It worked anyway, or we believed it did, which amounted to the same thing at our age.

Sea Breeze wasn’t originally a skincare product at all. It launched in 1906 as an antiseptic for cuts and scratches, and wasn’t reformulated as a facial astringent until Bristol-Myers picked it up decades later. What we were putting on a cotton ball in 1978 was, structurally, still a wound treatment. That probably explains a few things. Clearasil, meanwhile, was the first product ever built specifically for teenage skin, invented in 1950 by Ivan Combe, who marketed it directly to teenagers through American Bandstand and gave retailers free samples on consignment, on the theory that once we tried it, we’d keep buying it. We did.

Layered on top of all that history: Ten-O-Six from Bonne Bell, standing by with its own chemistry-lab smell; the sandpaper Buff Puf; Stridex pads in their little round tub. None of us knew any of this backstory at the time. We just knew the routine, which wasn’t a routine at all. It was four products, a bathroom mirror, and no idea what we were doing. It worked out fine, mostly because our mothers were doing the actual adult version next to us: Oil of Olay and Pond’s Cold Cream at night, which we assumed was for old people. We are now those people.

Makeup & Fragrance & the Marketing Wars Behind Them

Maybelline mascara exists because a teenager in 1915 Chicago singed off her eyelashes and improvised a fix out of Vaseline and coal dust. Mabel Williams was the teenager. Her brother, Tom Lyle Williams, watched her do it, recognized a business, and built a cosmetics company named half after her (Maybelline is Mabel plus Vaseline). By the time Great Lash launched in 1971, in the pink and green tube that’s barely changed since, the company was already fifty-six years removed from a bathroom accident. Great Lash is now one of the longest continuously sold products of the entire era, still on drugstore shelves today.

The bigger cultural shift happened in fragrance. Revlon’s Charlie, launched in 1973, was named after founder Charles Revson, not a woman, and it broke from every perfume convention before it. Earlier fragrances sold romance and being desired. Charlie sold a woman in a pantsuit striding down a New York street, alone, employed, and entirely uninterested in anyone’s opinion about it. It became the best-selling fragrance in the world within three years. Five years later, Charles of the Ritz (a company founded in 1926 by a hairdresser who borrowed the Ritz-Carlton’s prestige for his own name) answered with Enjoli, built around a jingle that recycled Peggy Lee’s 1963 song “I’m a Woman” into a promise that you could bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let him forget he’s a man. We were twelve and thirteen when that ad ran on constant rotation, absorbing a fully formed argument about work, marriage, and womanhood through a perfume commercial, which is as good a description of growing up in the 1970s as anything else in this article.

Bonne Bell’s Lip Smackers, which hit shelves in 1973 in flavors like strawberry and Dr Pepper, trace back to a company founded in 1927 by a door-to-door cosmetics salesman named Jesse Grover Bell, who made his first products on a hot plate in his own basement during the Depression and named the whole operation after his daughter. Ultra Brite toothpaste, on shelves since 1967, promised a smile that could double as a light source. And for the beach, Hawaiian Tropic traces back to a Daytona Beach lifeguard named Ron Rice, who in 1969 borrowed $500 from his father, watched someone else apply Coppertone, and decided he could do better. He was right, eventually. In the meantime it delivered a tan and, since it had virtually no SPF, a sunburn in the same bottle, which is why the backup plan was homemade: baby oil and iodine, mixed like a marinade and applied with the same level of scientific rigor.

Avon’s Skin So Soft launched in 1961 as a bath oil and only became famous as a bug repellent by accident. It contained citronella, and at some point in the following decade, someone figured out what that ingredient was actually good for, a rumor Avon never started and never really tried to stop. FDS feminine deodorant spray, developed by Alberto-Culver in 1966 and advertised relentlessly through the following decade, addressed a problem that, on reflection, nobody had actually diagnosed in the first place.

Tanning: Baby Oil, Iodine, and Zero SPF

Coppertone goes back to 1944, when a pharmacist and former Air Force pilot named Benjamin Green developed a protective lotion for fighter pilots getting sunburned over the Pacific. The girl-and-dog logo, a cocker spaniel tugging at a little blond girl’s swimsuit to reveal her tan line, didn’t show up until 1953, and had to be redrawn from scratch in 1959 after the originals were lost in a fire. By the 1970s, Coppertone had built a whole Solar Research Center and helped lay the groundwork for the SPF rating system the FDA eventually adopted. We ignored all of it in favor of the products below, which is the central joke of sun care in this decade: the science was arriving at the exact same moment we were actively opting out of it.

Hawaiian Tropic exists because a Daytona Beach lifeguard named Ron Rice watched someone apply Coppertone from his lifeguard stand in the late 1960s and decided he could do better. He borrowed $500 from his father, mixed his own formula, and started selling it out of a cooler at pools and beaches until it caught on. Founded in 1969, it eventually grew into a company worth over $150 million, on the strength of a tan that came with essentially no SPF, and therefore no meaningful protection at all.

Bain de Soleil has the oldest and strangest pedigree of the bunch. The orange gel formula was invented in 1925 by a Parisian hairdresser known as Antoine, whose clients included Coco Chanel, and who capitalized on the tan Chanel had made fashionable after a Mediterranean vacation. The product crossed the Atlantic decades later and spent the ’70s and ’80s selling itself on a single slogan: “for the St. Tropez tan,” which promised a glamour that had nothing to do with a New Jersey public pool and everything to do with the way the commercial made you feel about it.

When the bottle ran out, or never got bought in the first place, the backup was homemade: baby oil and iodine, mixed in a bowl like a marinade and applied with the same level of scientific rigor as the store-bought stuff, which is to say none. A deep tan wasn’t a health concern in the 1970s. It was proof that summer had actually happened to you, and the tanning bed would show up by decade’s end to make sure you could keep the project going after Labor Day. Nobody in this section was protecting their skin. Everybody was working on their color.

Gen Jones Hair Products That Made History

The most consequential hair product story of the decade has nothing to do with shine or scent. It’s Afro Sheen, and the company behind it. George E. Johnson founded Johnson Products in Chicago in 1954 with a $250 bank loan, which he reportedly secured by telling the white loan officer it was for a family vacation. As Black consumers moved through the 1960s and ’70s from straightened, relaxed styles toward the natural texture and pride of the Black Power movement, Johnson’s company moved with them, introducing the Afro Sheen Blow Out Kit in the late 1960s. In 1971, Johnson Products became the first Black-owned company listed on the American Stock Exchange.

The company sponsored Soul Train, funded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s payroll when it ran short, and hosted the launch of Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket in its own cafeteria. George Johnson died in July of 2026, at 99, having built one of the most quietly consequential companies of the era we’re describing in the rest of this article.

C.D. Murray started making it in 1925 on the principle that an honest product at a fair price would sell itself, and the recipe (petrolatum, mineral oil, perfume) hasn’t changed since. Dark and Lovely arrived later, in 1978, as the first at-home no-lye relaxer, which meant a standing salon appointment was no longer required to get the style done.

On the other side of the aisle, Clairol’s Herbal Essence launched in 1971 as a direct response to the era’s back-to-nature mood, blending the scent of sixteen herbs and wildflowers and putting a woodland nymph on a green bottle. Breck Shampoo’s backstory is stranger: founder John Breck was a Massachusetts fire captain who started losing his hair in his twenties, blamed soap for it, and taught himself chemistry to fix the problem, eventually developing the first pH-balanced liquid shampoo in 1930. His son took over in 1936 and hired an illustrator to paint the “Breck Girls” that ran in magazines for decades after.

Jergens’ Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific arrived in 1976, built on a marketing plan that was, essentially, the product name repeated at volume. Sun In offered the same era’s answer to at-home highlights, chemistry that had more in common with pool bleach than professional color, and delivered orange about as often as it delivered blonde. In 1976, Clairol paired Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill with Short & Sassy shampoo and conditioner, timed to a haircut every salon in the country was suddenly being asked to recreate.

Men’s Grooming, and a Century of Splashing Something On

Old Spice predates Generation Jones by decades. Founder William Lightfoot Schultz launched it in 1937, riding a colonial Americana trend sparked by the opening of Colonial Williamsburg, and chose a nautical theme purely because it photographed well, down to a bottle shaped like a buoy. Aqua Velva is even older, introduced in 1917, and has the strangest backstory in the entire men’s aisle: its original formula used potable alcohol, and during Prohibition, people actually drank it to get around the ban. The company responded by switching to specially denatured alcohol, adding a bittering agent, and dyeing it the blue color it’s still known for today, specifically to keep desperate men from chugging their aftershave. By the time we were splashing it on in junior high, that entire crisis was fifty years in the past and nobody mentioned it.

Mennen Skin Bracer traces back to Gerhard Mennen, a German immigrant who opened his own apothecary in 1878 and built a company on baby powder before Skin Bracer launched as an aftershave in 1931. Barbasol, in its striped can, was invented in 1919 by an Indianapolis chemist named Frank Shields, who wanted a shaving cream that didn’t need to be worked into a lather first.

Brylcreem goes back even further to 1928 Birmingham, England, and reached peak cultural relevance when the Royal Air Force issued it to pilots during World War II, who became known as the “Brylcreem Boys.” The jingle (“a little dab’ll do ya”) came later, written by an ad man at Young & Rubicam, decades before it hit us on Saturday morning TV.

Vitalis offered the same slicked shine without the grease, at least in theory. And then there was Hai Karate, developed by Pfizer’s Leeming division in 1967 on a premise so committed to the bit that every bottle shipped with a mock self-defense booklet, instructing the wearer on how to fend off women driven wild by the scent. It’s a joke that only works if you already assume the cologne works, which, at thirteen, we did.

Tell Us What We Missed

None of this was glamorous, and all of it was everywhere. That’s the actual definition of a Generation Jones product: something so ordinary at the time that nobody thought to write down where it came from, and so specific to that decade that describing it now, origin story and all, puts you right back in front of a bathroom mirror that was too small, holding a product invented decades before you were born by someone whose name you never once thought to ask.

Tell us in the comments which one was yours, which company history surprised you, and what we left out. And follow for more content made for the generation that used all of this without ever once reading the label.

Want a deep dive of who we are and what shaped us?
 The Definitive Guide to Generation Jones

Sources

• Generation Jones – Wikipedia
• Jonathan Pontell at GenJones.net
• Generation Jones Looks for Attention – RealClearPolitics, 2008
• The Definitive Guide to Generation Jones
• Generation Jones Explained: The Origin of the Name

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