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Remember when we were ‘free and clear’?

By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Monday, August 4, 2008

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I was enjoying the sights and sounds and scents of my morning walk a month or two ago (before the heat and drought cooked all the blooms off everything), and suddenly remembered the “free and clear” trend of the early 1990s. With a shudder of horror.

I’m not sure what or who started it, but suddenly it was the thing for manufacturers to make their products colorless and fragrance-free. Consumers were supposed to equate the absence of color and scent with purity, and extra wonderfulness.

I had been seeing (and avoiding) free and clear remakes of familiar products for some time before I was confronted in early 1992 with what I recall as the peak of the insanity: Crystal Pepsi.

Crystal Pepsi was caffeine-free, but purported to taste like cola. I don’t know, I never tasted it. It was just wrong. I guess a lot of people were braver than I, because in December of that year, Coca-Cola released Tab Clear.

Remember the 1993 Saturday Night Live sketch in which a product called “Crystal Gravy” was advertised with the tag line, “Finally, you can see your meat”? Kevin Nealon and Julia Sweeney were shown eating meat covered in what looked like corn syrup. I hadn’t seen anything so gross since SNL’s “Bass-O-Matic” sketch, in which Dan Aykroyd appeared to drink a pureed six-inch bass.

But back to the “free and clear” trend—I am a born skeptic, and I noticed the ingredients listed in a lot of the products didn’t change much, except for the exclusion of color and fragrance. I doubted if that, alone, made reformulated products more wonderful than the old ones.

Beyond that, I like fragrance. Color, too. I sought frantically for bath soap, laundry soap, face cream and shampoo that still looked pretty and smelled good. I figured the next product to fall prey to the trend would be perfume. I envisioned women paying $40 for water in a pretty bottle.

In food products, the “free and clear” trend went away pretty quickly. In cosmetics, it hung on longer. It’s still around, to a degree, since cosmetics companies have managed to convince a whole lot of women that they have sensitive skin, and need products specially formulated for sensitive skin—i.e., with no color or fragrance.

It sounds rather dainty to have sensitive skin. Delicate. More feminine, somehow. I’m afraid my skin is no more sensitive than I am. It may be a result of a career in journalism.

I got sucked into the sensitive skin vortex briefly years ago, and bought a jar of “fragrance and additive-free” face cream. Unfortunately, without the perfume in there, face cream smells like the chemicals it’s made from. And I’ve never been clear on what constitutes an additive, as opposed to an ingredient. What is an additive that’s not added? An un-thing? Anti-matter?

On the whole, though, consumers have moved away from the “free and clear” trend of the nineties. Now there’s aromatherapy, which I embrace to a degree—I don’t see the point of a candle or a stick of goo or a spray can or a little jar of chemicals that smell like apple pie, for instance. If I smell apple pie, I kind of expect there to be an apple pie somewhere. If all I find is a candle, I’m going to feel a little cheated.

I gave the memory of the whole “free and clear” trend a brief thought and a smile that morning, and went on with my smelly walk. There was magnolia, and mimosa, and jasmine, with an occasional hint of moldering garbage (scent is a double-edged sword, you know).

In the winter, when nothing is blooming and scenting my walks, I can revel in the occasional whiff of April Fresh Downy, as moms do early-morning laundry to get that special top or pair of jeans ready for school.

I’ve largely forgotten all about color-free, fragrance-free, additive-free products. But I can’t quite shake the idea of Perfume Free.

Do you think I could sell it?

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