What’s in a brand name? From Beechams to Brasso

Showering the other day, I noticed a visitor had left his shampoo behind. Going through the familiar ablutions I stared glassily, half-focused on the immediate foreground, in the way you do when your activity requires some but not all of your attention. Vosene. The trade name started running through my mind. I repeated it to myself out loud. ‘Vosene’. What an odd title for a shampoo. It sounded cold, clinical, antiseptic, perhaps a little harsh: a nod more in the direction of hygiene than of the soft, caring, nurturing image that more recently branded hair products aim to convey.

I bet (I thought, remembering my 1950s bedroom wall poster of nuclear power stations) that Vosene is a mid-20th-century brand name. It has the ring of science about it: for in those days ‘science,’ ‘scientific’ and even ‘chemical’ were hooray-words. Science was the future, science was making our lives better, leading the way.