{"id":40,"date":"2018-04-16T10:44:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/?p=40"},"modified":"2018-05-11T10:34:24","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T17:34:24","slug":"an-introduction-to-nivea-and-its-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/2018\/04\/16\/an-introduction-to-nivea-and-its-history\/","title":{"rendered":"An Introduction to NIVEA and its History"},"content":{"rendered":"

NIVEA is a German beauty product and personal care company that was founded in 1911 to market and sell a new, recently-patented skin cream that demographically targeted white women. The specific benefits of their breakout product, “Eucerin,” were vaguely defined and remain unclear, but the moisturizer gained enough popularity throughout Europe and parts of the United States to allow its proprietors to expand the scopes of their business. NIVEA fully rebranded themselves in 1958,\u00a0in an attempt to step away from their reputation as simply the vender of their flagship product, and transformed themselves into a larger figure in the skincare industry by introducing various kinds of sunscreen and specialized products for children \u2014 while still maintaining a marketing scheme that brazenly appealed to idealized notions of white femininity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Less than 30 years later, NIVEA further reframed their brand to appeal more widely to the global market that they sought to engage with. And so, in 1986, they sparked a self-proclaimed \u201cRevolution in Skincare\u201d by choosing to encompass men\u2019s skincare needs into their mission statement: \u201cNo longer would men have to use products that belonged to their wives, sisters or mothers. Now they could use NIVEA for Men, a range of skincare products just for them.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Although this shift in their targeted demographic widened the scope from exclusively appealing to white women to include white men as well, NIVEA’s marketing antics are far from sensitive and accepting \u2014 after all, the name “NIVEA” stems from the Latin word “niveus,” which translates to “snow-white.” The two ad campaigns we will be analyzing for our project both revolve around Nivea\u2019s recent perpetuation of and direct appeal to Westernized, white-centered, ethnocentric projections of beauty and health.\u00a0Up until August of 2011, Nivea\u2019s problematic tendencies were poorly-veiled by a complete lack of engagement with any notion of ethnic inclusivity, which becomes abundantly evident after merely a brief skim through the history of their advertisements: sampled from\u00a01911, 1935, 1964, and 1992, respectively.<\/span><\/p>\n

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But given the heightened awareness to widespread systemic injustice that the 21st century saw, and with a proportionately growing attention paid to the pervasive corporate exclusion of minorities in the beauty industry, NIVEA eventually decided to attempt to venture into the world of intersectionality.\u00a0Alas, although one of their concluding points in the autobiographical section of their website states \u201cFor 100 YEARS we have created skincare products which means NIVEA understands skin like no one else, for any person, male or female and for any skin type \u2013 NIVEA for life,\u201d it is ultimately unsurprising that the company\u2019s first few misguided forays into ethnic inclusivity were massive failures, complete with extremely telling cultural implications.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NIVEA is a German beauty product and personal care company that was founded in 1911 to market and sell a new, recently-patented skin cream that demographically targeted white women. The specific benefits of their breakout product, “Eucerin,” were vaguely defined and remain unclear, but the moisturizer gained enough popularity throughout Europe and parts of the … Continue reading An Introduction to NIVEA and its History<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1790,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-uncategorized","post_format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1790"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/50"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/anth344-spring2018-group03\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}