Not the kind of “cute” you think I mean!
Ah, the school photo. The time-honored tradition of getting into the yearbook. If all else failed, and you didn’t join clubs or missed the photo session, you were guaranteed the bare minimum of your class picture in the yearbook.
Unless you were a ninja or camera shy, then you were your school’s well-kept secret.
The evolution of the school photo over the course of a student’s life starts off with cute, then awkward/bad hair/braces/glasses (sometimes a combination of all of these incredible qualities – like my sixth and seventh grade photos), and finally, when we’re lucky, we outrgrow those awkward moments and photos, and have some quality years in the yearbook. Once I got past middle school, my high school photos were pretty darn good.
They’re not sunglasses in the photo good, but they’re good.
At any time in the life of a teenager, however, those photos could become witness to something even worse than glasses, braces, and bad hair…
Pimples!
You don’t want THOSE things immortalizing themselves in your high school yearbook!!!!!
So, what do you do when you need them gone FAST?
How do you do that?
Well, look no further than today’s commercial from 1991, which combines MTV with your classic skin care commercial!
Yeah, Oxycute ’em, and wipe those damn oil demons away!
They NEVER saw it coming!
Oxy Pads were first created during a boom in products meant to address the complexities of teenage skin in the 1980s. Acne was the enemy, products like Clearasil and Oxy were the answer to getting rid of those embarrassing invaders.
The medicated pads went to work breaking up the oil and impurities that cause breakouts on skin, and toted quick results. Not overnight, but fast enough.
I used products like this – specifically, I used Stridex pads, which were basically same as Oxy – to tame my super mild pimples. I had the very common forehead acne, which had everything to do with my wonderful bangs and greasy forehead. These days, I still have greasy skin, but my breakouts are usually confined to my chin. Even before masks, as an adult, my chin was a trouble spot. I still find products like Clean and Clear, Oxy, Clearasil, and Stridex useful, but I stick with micellar water, as it tends to work well for me, since the combination of products on the salicylic acid and alcohol combination can be very drying.
The commercials for the medicated pads used to gross me out the same way Biore pore strips did – the promise of eliminating something unsightly, while highlighting how nasty the result is. The medicated pad commercials shows all those horrible skin cells breaking up like soap suds over the introduction of salicylic acid and alcohol.
EWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!
These commercials always depicted a very over-exaggerated mindset of “Holy crap! ACNE!” that as an adult, makes me laugh. I never found these products to work the fastest they possibly could. By contrast, Clearasil seemed to do the best for me, but I still used this stuff anyway.
So, I sorta…
But they always come back.
These days, Oxy Medicated Pads are made by GlaxoSmithKline. In 1991, they were made by the former SmithKline Beecham (a merger that occurred in 1988), and later merged with Glaxo Wellcome in 2000 to become today’s pharmaceutical company. Oxy Pads are easy to find, and the advertising, previously targeting teenage boys, is more Equal Opportunity User these days, as hey, us girls have pimples we want to get rid of too!!!
SEE?! We believe in the power of vaporized Oxy Clean Pads too!
Have a great Throwback Thursday!