| For decades, dyeing one’s hair has been so cheap and easy that few of us stop to think about it. But in 1956, it was radical. That year, the beauty company Clairol launched a product called Miss Clairol—which made it possible, for the first time, to lighten your hair in a single step, at home. The process struck onlookers at the International Beauty Show, in New York City, as so extraordinary that they stared, openmouthed, each time it was demonstrated. During the two decades that followed, the number of American women coloring their hair shot up by more than four hundred per cent. As Malcolm Gladwell noted in The New Yorker, in 1999, the revolution was fuelled, in no small part, by a pair of copywriters. Shirley Polykoff, an ambitious Brooklyn native working with Clairol, came up with one of the most effective questions in the history of ad slogans—“Does she or doesn’t she?” Later, a copywriter working with L’Oréal, Ilon Specht, countered with what became an iconic declaration: “Because I’m worth it.” Each phrase, Gladwell writes, expertly conjured “the particular feminist sensibilities of the day,” and connected a “seemingly trivial” product with profound questions about sexual politics and identity. (No less than Betty Friedan, he recounts, bleached her hair on the strength of a different Polykoff slogan, shortly before Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique.”) At a time when corporations were using a new, psychology-focussed approach to advertising, the two copywriters harnessed language to communicate—and make money from—aspirations that went well beyond hair. Whatever you make of their strategy, it succeeded. “Products,” Gladwell observes, “offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation.” | 
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