Here's another of those "in the shower" thoughts. When I was young too many decades ago, there were monthly magazines that catered to the ladies who presided over our homes.
As a bright kid who burned through reading material too fast, I spent some time perusing those. I wasn't the target audience, but they were there and I was bored. What I'm musing about today was the unusual ads for Breck shampoo.
The women in most magazine ads were somewhere in the cute-pretty-beautiful range. Not so in the Breck ads. They featured what I remember as oil paintings of normal, nothing special women with beautiful hair.
I concluded it had to be a conscious choice. Pitching the product to women who knew they'd never be a great beauty, but maybe could have very nice looking hair.
I thought it odd then, and still do today, though I'll admit I hadn't mused about it for decades. All these years later, I wonder if the "pitch" worked? I suppose I'll never know. I do know it didn't catch on with advertisers generally.
An Internet search turns up the fact that quite a few of the women so pictured were female relatives of Dr. John Breck, the firm's founder. He could pay them a nice honorarium for posing, write it off as a business expense, and they'd end up with a flattering portrait. Something other than pure profit motive had to be involved.
