Dutch booklet for menarcheal girls - Early Dutch Tampax ads - Early Dutch booklet for Camelia pads - Dutch exhibit about menstruation, 1982 (article) - Dutch Nefa menstrual pad ads, 1938, 1967 - early brochure for the German Amira (1950s)
German and French menstrual ads using nudity.
The tampon page
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The Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health

Ad for Amira menstrual tampon (the Netherlands, August 1979 in the magazine "Mensen" [People])
Blue liquid (next page)

Imagine an American company showing this ad in an American magazine. You can't, can you!?

The Dutchman who contributed the scans of this ad wrote,

Nice to see your recent updates and especial your mentioning the difference between the U.S. and Europe in advertising.

Your Polivia ad but also the Swedish and Finnish ads reminds me of a series of single and double-page ads of Amira tampons [in the Netherlands.]. [See also German and French menstrual ads using nudity.]

The brand was of the well-known company Mølnlycke but is nowadays non-existent in my country.

The name Amira means princess, see e.g. http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/Amira: "The girl's name Amira \a-mi-ra\ is pronounced ah-MEER-ah. It is of Arabic and Hebrew origin, and its meaning is "princess; treetop, proverb, or sheaf of corn. Feminine form of Amir." In the seventies in the Netherlands I had never heard of this name (except as the brand-name) but nowadays sometimes you read the name when a girl or a horse is called Amira. [Maybe even more so because of the large Muslim population of the Netherlands.]

The double-page ad I send you [below] shows a nude woman from the side. The ad shows the reader how to position the tampon, including her finger position. So in this ad the position of the woman is more to the point than in the Polivia ad, I think.

The ad is one of a series of three but they have all the same layout, the same sort of photos and the same sort of copy as the one I'm sending you.

This particular ad appeared August 1979 in magazine "Mensen" [People]. The magazine was not exactly a women's magazine as [the American] Cosmopolitan but more psychology-oriented. But other ads of the series were publicized in the Dutch weekly women magazines Libelle and Margriet.

The title: A tampon sits invisible within you. That's why you ask yourself: will it do no harm?

The body (no pun intended) text is quite large: in the seventies many Dutch women had to be assured or to be reassured that tampons are normal, healthy, etc. [just as in this German ad from 1989]. The same companies had just made their sanitary napkins more comfortable, etc. (beltless, and the first ultra thins came on market), so the competition between napkins and tampons was on.

Toxic shock syndrome was no issue in 1979 (only P&G was aware internally that problems were ahead I think at that moment), but the fear of foreign objects in a woman's body is, I think, a constant problem. [Actually, a supermarket tabloid wrote about other serious problems with Rely in 1975-76, way before the toxic shock outbreak.]

So the ad mentions it but says it is complete healthy, see e.g. the first column, page 2, second half: little pieces are no problem, they go with the flow out of you; the chance of irritation is lower than with napkins. That is exactly the same argument as in the Tampax report of 1945!!

But the test on the right-hand page is the same as in many other ads of that time or nowadays: the blue liquid did not resemble red blood!

I thank again the kind Dutchman who sent these scans as well as many other items!


Below: The entire ad runs across two pages; the enlarged left-hand side is below this image. The enlarged right-hand page is here.
Large words: "A tampon sits invisible within you. That's why you ask yourself: will it do no harm?"
 
Below: The two photos at top, enlarged.
 

NEXT: Facing page of the ad - Early brochure for the German Amira (1950s) - Dutch booklet for menarcheal girls - Early Dutch Tampax ads - Early Dutch booklet for Camelia pads - Dutch exhibit about menstruation, 1982 (article) - Dutch Nefa menstrual pad ads, 1938, 1967 - The tampon page - German and French menstrual ads using nudity.
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