This ad that ran in teen magazines deserves a gold medal for being universally offensive to every shape of woman who ever drunk cried in the mirror.
Here’s the copy:
Your breasts may be too big, too saggy, too pert, too flat, too full, too far apart, too close together, too A cup, too lopsided, too jiggly, too pale, too padded, too pointy, too pendulous or just two mosquito bites. But with Dep styling products, at least you can have your hair the way you want it. Make the most of what you’ve got.
It’s truly hilarious that this isn’t an ad for implants. Anyway, this Dep treasure comes courtesy of Jean Kilbourne, who lectures on the damaging ways ads view women, and it was one of the worst.
Back then, around the ’50s as far as we can surmise, the company decided a top notch strategy would be to tell young women: your boobs suck, but buy our stuff because your hair is one thing you can actually get a handle on. (When you’re doing your own breasts wrong, how the hell else are you going to compensate for your lack of self-worth unless you buy all their hair gels?) Thanks, old timey jerks, for mind screwing us into oblivion about how terrible our boobs look so we’d cozy up to the idea of bigger hair.
Exciting news. You can still use their products to make the best of your disappointing life that suffers from disappointing boobage because the company is still around. This is officially the negging of ads.