Vintage Poster Archives
Cappiello L'Oreal 1909 | Vintage Advertising Poster
Cappiello L'Oreal 1909 | Vintage Advertising Poster
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A woman's face appears at the centre of a swirling vortex of amber and golden hair, the spiral sweeping outward in broad concentric bands against a deep black ground. The face is rendered in a handful of confident strokes: pale skin, a dark eye, a slight smile. The hair fills the picture plane in waves of orange, gold, and burnt sienna. Above, 'L'OREAL' in large olive-gold bold capitals. Below, 'Teinture Inoffensive pour Cheveux' in pale blue-green lettering with the Imp. G. Delattre printer credit.
Leonetto Cappiello (1875–1942) designed this poster in 1909, the year Eugène Schueller formally incorporated the Société Française de Teintures Inoffensives pour Cheveux at 7 rue du Louvre, Paris, the company that would in time become L'Oréal. The poster is among the earliest pieces of L'Oreal advertising in existence. Cappiello was at this point producing work under his long-running contract with the Paris print house Vercasson, and the design shows his method at its most characteristic: one simplified form, a black ground, and a palette of two or three closely related tones that reads instantly from across a room.
What Cappiello achieved here was to make the product itself the composition. The swirling hair is not a background element but the entire image. No salon interior, no figure in a dress, no botanical border. Just hair in motion, a face inside it, and a brand name above.
Reproduced from the 1909 lithograph as an archival print on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art Paper, using pigment-based inks for long-term colour stability. A natural fit for anyone drawn to early French commercial art, to the beginnings of modern brand advertising, or to Cappiello's singular way of reducing an idea to its simplest graphic form.
