Sun-In, Nair, and Lip Smackers: The GenX Beauty Regimen

Shimmery and glossy for junior prom.

​What did Generation X teenagers do to look good? Today, let’s talk about Sun-In, Nair, and Lip Smackers. If you like this article, please tell your friends. You can also subscribe to it through LinkedIn: Look for 7080: GenX Pop.

What did Generation X teenagers do to look good? Today, let’s talk about Sun-In, Nair, and Lip Smackers. If you like this article, please tell your friends. You can also subscribe to it through LinkedIn: Look for 7080: GenX Pop.

I would not want to be a tween or a teenage girl today. Social media, app filters, and influencers promote unobtainable beauty standards far beyond what we GenXers experienced when we were young. 

Marketers and advertisers have always exploited the insecurity of young women in order to sell lotions and potions, but they had fewer platforms to tout their messages in the past. Magazine advertisements and television commercials were their primary modes of communication. Now, with kids always having phones in their hands, companies and influencers can subject young people to a never-ending stream of advice about health and beauty. Much of that information is questionable, if not downright harmful. 

Over the past few months, myriad news stories have detailed the rise of a new kind of customer at Sephora, Ulta, and other cosmetics stores: Tweens. Impressionable girls have latched on to the messages of vloggers on TikTok, Instagram, and other social media outlets, where they are encouraged to purchase beauty products (some costly ones) that they don’t need. Imagine being an eleven- or twelve-year-old girl worrying about wrinkles or age spots.

As a GenXer, I certainly absorbed messages about beauty standards. Some of them linger today. That’s why I feel self-conscious when I go to work makeup-free, why I worry how much of my grey hair shows when I pull it back, and why I beat myself up for gaining weight. Body image issues can begin at an early age and last a lifetime. 

So, what kinds of messages did GenX girls receive? And what products did we use to accentuate the positive and hide the flaws?

The perfect suntan was everything in the seventies and eighties. One of the big messages was, “Brown is beautiful.” Not too brown, of course. Remember that the ideal beauty standard in those days was overwhelmingly Caucasian (at least according to advertisers). Few women of color appeared in cosmetics ads.


Even young girls got the tanning message. Mattel released Malibu Barbie in 1971, and she stayed with us for nearly a decade. Barbie’s commercial jingle emphasized what the doll modeled: having a “golden tan” and “gold hair” was a good thing. And we believed it.

I spent many summer vacations chasing sunbeams across my yard. Reclining on a towel, I slathered myself in Coppertone lotion or Johnson’s Baby Oil. I didn’t go so far as to use Crisco (some girls did), but yes, I fried myself in summer sunshine. Turn me over…I’m done. As we moved into the eighties, some GenXers moved into tanning salons. Nobody worried about wrinkles or skin cancer. What could be worse than that, you ask? Pale legs, obviously!

If you achieved the perfect tan, you needed golden highlights to accompany it. You could start old school and squirt some lemon juice on your head. Or you could use a product from the drugstore shelf: Sun-In. In the 1970s, Sun-In came in a pump bottle; its primary ingredients were lemon juice and diluted peroxide. Do you know what happens to brown hair when you use a lot of Sun-In? I do. You don’t get beachy highlights. You have orange hair. Or, in my case, according to a boy in my class, Ronald McDonald-orange hair.

Caring for your hair was vital, too. You needed the right shampoo. There was Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific, which produced ads showing young men sniffing the hair of wholesome-looking young ladies. That’s not creepy at all. Then there was Body on Tap, a beer-enriched product that promised to give your hair “body body body.” Or you were a “Breck Girl” who aspired to look like the models in the shampoo advertisements. Those models included Christie Brinkley, Brooke Shields, Kim Basinger, Jaclyn Smith, Cybill Shepherd, and Cheryl Tiegs. Farrah Fawcett wannabes washed their tresses with Wella Balsam.

Other popular hair products of the era included Pert, Agree, Flex, and Tame. And, of course, our hair got taller as we entered the eighties, so we needed just the right hairspray. Some girls (and boys) went all in with Aquanet, while White Rain, Salon Selectives, Rave, Mink, and Vo5 were reasonable alternatives.

While the hair on your head needed to look perfect, the hair on your face, under your arms, and on your legs was a different story. I remember the pearl-clutching that happened when Madonna had the nerve to show up in public with hairy armpits. 

You had to shave and pluck and wax. If I could turn back time (Cher!), I would tell my younger self, “Don’t wax your eyebrows. They won’t grow back one day, and you’ll have to draw them on!”

If you could stand the stench, you might try a chemical depilatory, such as Neet or Nair. In Nair’s 1970s commercials, young women danced and sang, “If you dare wear short shorts, Nair for short shorts.” 

Once you had the hair situation taken care of, you had to focus on your face—first, the war on acne. Acne1. Teenagers 0. 

Sometimes, I used Aapri, an apricot scrub that removed the entire first layer of skin from my face. Then I’d slap on some Sea Breeze because nothing feels better on an open wound than an astringent. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “feel the burn.”

I always carried a handy tube of Clearasil in my purse. Frequently, the pimple cream served more as a beacon to the location of my zits rather than a solution to the problem. Noxema was refreshing, but Mudd was horrifying. It was a greenish-grey goop that I smeared all over my face and cracked when it dried. I’ve often wondered if Mudd inspired the makeup artists for Lucio Fulci’s movie Zombie.

GenXers didn’t have YouTube and TikTok tutorials for applying cosmetics. We followed the directions on the back of the package or tried to emulate the makeup of magazine models. The results depended on the skill and the product. 

As a poor kid, I couldn’t afford the fancy-schmancy eye shadows and lipsticks that department stores kept in well-lit glass cases. I found my first makeup kit in my Christmas stocking. It was one of those generic sets with four shimmery eyeshadows, one blush, and two shallow lip gloss pots. When I emptied that kit, I headed to the Wet n Wild section at the drugstore. It was there that I found the signature eyeliner of my teen years. It was metallic and about the same shade of blue as my friend’s Chevette, a car that wouldn’t go up a hill unless you got a running start two blocks back. Finally, I always carried my Bonne Belle Lip Smackers lip balm (Dr Pepper flavor) in my pocket.

Once you got your face on, you topped everything off with a spritz of fragrance. I used the migraine-inducing Sweet Honesty by Avon as one of my first perfumes. Later, I moved to Charlie. Fragrance commercials abounded. Jontue ads evoked Harlequin romance in a bottle. Prince Matchabelli’s Wind Song captured the male point of view (I can’t seem to forget you). And who remembers the 8-hour perfume for the 24-hour woman, Enjoli? Its target audience was working women, as its jingle asserted that the Enjoli woman could “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man.” Gag.

For a while, I was fond of Love’s Baby Soft Perfume. I never saw its commercial then but found one a few weeks ago on YouTube. It's the most inappropriate, jaw-dropping commercial I’ve ever seen. “Because innocence is sexier than you think.”  I don’t know who the marketers had in mind as the target audience for these ads, but all I can say is, “Ick.”

I believe the founder of Revlon said, “In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the store, we sell hope.” In many instances, these beauty companies sell fantasy instead of hope. No product in the world will make a teenager look like Kelly LeBrock or Farrah Fawcett. You already look like that, or you lost the genetic lottery.

Perhaps that’s why eating disorders grew in the 1980s, along with body dysmorphic disorders. Health and beauty advertisements could exacerbate emotional and mental health issues. Additionally, they set up women to deal with the makeup tax for a lifetime.

What’s the makeup tax? Research shows that women who wear cosmetics in the workplace earn more money than those who go for the natural look, and their coworkers treat them better. Makeup impacts our earnings and our professional reputation. While it may help with our compensation, it’s still a money suck on our bank accounts. It costs a lot to meet society’s expectations of your appearance. The beauty industry (skincare, fragrance, hair, and cosmetics) pulled in $430 BILLION in 2023.

And it sucks away your time. I can almost guarantee that women spend more time preparing for work than men. People complain about the time wasted on their commute to work, but you rarely hear women complaining about how much time it takes to look “presentable” at work.

Despite what GenX women have had to deal with over a lifetime, I still think today’s tweens and teenage girls face more pressure to look perfect than we did. I hope we can develop ways to get them off the phone and comfortable in their own skin.

If you enjoyed this article, please share it, like it, and add your thoughts in the comment section. What were your favorite products and beauty rituals in the seventies and eighties?

Next week – Be Kind and Rewind: The rise of the VHS and video stores. But for now, Calgon take me away!