The "Blue Seal" of Health: Hygiene and Accreditation in Interwar British Soap Advertising

By the 1920s the British market was flooded by branded soaps. Pears, Sunlight, Vinolia and Lifebuoy competed with slightly lesser-known brands like Hudsons, Fels-Naptha and Colleen to name but a few. Each brand attempted to carve out its unique profile. Pears positioned itself as the guarantor of ‘beautiful complexions' for young children. Fels-Naptha was a housecleaner which facilitated ‘miraculous' improvements in social relationships. Lifebuoy was a hygienic soap for active/sporting men, women and children. In this over-crowded market branding alone began to prove inadequate and claims often overlapped. Thus Lifebuoy, Hudsons, Wrights Coal Tar and to some extent Pears—all made claims based on hygiene. It was within this context that Wrights Coal Tar began using ‘accreditation' as a way of bolstering its claims to being the most effective defence against germs. It claimed that an ‘Institute of Hygiene' had annually awarded it the ‘Blue Seal' of ‘purity, quality and merit' since 1904. It also claimed similar accreditation from the ‘National Institute of Industrial Psychology' and the ‘Encyclopaedia Brittanica'.

Whereas claims based on the authority of science were not unique, the claims of annual accreditations from seemingly professional bodies was new to soap advertisements in the 1920s-30s. It bears witness to both the saturation of branding campaigns as well as to the capital-driven efforts to fashion a popularly recognizable scientific standard. The fictitious or compromised nature of these accrediting bodies points to the dialectic of modern consumer culture which both seeks and subverts verifiable regimes of validation thereby being forced to continually re-educate the consumer. Interestingly since the early 1920s the Rockefeller Foundation and the British government were actually holding talks over opening an ‘Institute of Hygiene' in London. The Wrights campaign therefore also attests to the degree the idiom of ads remained implicated in their immediate local contexts.