Salon Selectives

Helene Curtis, the Chicago company that began in 1927 as the National Mineral Company and built itself on Suave, introduced Salon Selectives in 1987, billing it as the first salon-inspired hair-care line sold on mass-market shelves. Sales passed $100 million within a year or so, and one observer called it "probably the most successful hair-care launch in the history of the universe." By 1989 Suave, Finesse and Salon Selectives were all among the top ten shampoo brands in the country.

The 1990s were its decade. The bottles were bright pink and coral, the scent was apple, and the commercials that ran from the late 1980s into the early 1990s sold the line with a jingle built around "like you just stepped out of a salon". In the late 1990s the brand still held a 6.5 percent share of the American hair-care market. Unilever agreed to buy Helene Curtis in February 1996 for about $770 million, and in 2000 the line was revamped with clear containers and themed names.

Inside Unilever's portfolio it became, as Rob Walker put it in a 2008 magazine feature on the brand's afterlife, "a casualty of brand-portfolio consolidation," and it was discontinued in 2004. River West Brands of Chicago bought the intellectual property in December 2007 and announced a relaunch in February 2008 with the same pink bottles and apple fragrance, four shampoos, five conditioners, two mousses and a hair spray, sold online first; the former Helene Curtis USA president Eugene Zeffren said their research showed more than 80 percent awareness among the target buyers, and a River West video of Chicagoans stopped at random and asked whether they remembered Salon Selectives showed a surprising number answering by singing the jingle. CLT International brought it back again in 2011 with the red-and-pink bottles and green-apple scent restored, and Evergreen Consumer Brands acquired it on May 31, 2018.