Don’t you just want to eat it – but first, what IS it? The beauty of Nad’s.
Lucy Zee looks back on the late-nineties, early-aughts infomercial craze that was… Nad’s.
In my prepubescent tweens, I started to notice body hair on myself. My arms, my legs, my armpits, my upper lip. I wasn’t so much upset but more curious than anything. Why did we grow hair in these places? When does it stop? Who did my mum buy this Venus razor for?
Body hair was on the mind and apparently on the TV too. In the early 2000s, at 10am on a weekday, you were hard pressed to find a channel showing anything other than blenders, mops and magnet wool mattress toppers but there was one infomercial that stuck out. Through all the American male voiceovers there was a different type of infomercial – a beautiful pale skinned, dark haired woman stood in front of the camera and in an Australian accent she said:
“As a mother, it broke my heart to see my daughter upset because of her unwanted body hair, so I created Nads, a natural hair removal product….”
Nads was touted as a kitchen creation born from the love of a mother for her hairy daughter. Sue Ismeil, the creator of the Australian-based international brand created the hair removal gel by tweaking her grandmother’s original recipe. Sue created the molasses and lemon concoction in her own home, using it on her daughter, her friends and co-workers and eventually becoming an international multi-million dollar company.
Mmm, lemon and molasses.
The infomercial spoke about her family, examples of hair removal on real-life hairy humans and a heavy emphasis on how natural it was. It spawned so many more baby infomercials that over the next few years Nad’s was impossible to miss on TV.
Here are some iconic moments from a truly strange moment in the golden years of Nad’s infomercial fame:
Real life hair removal on screen
I had never seen anyone get waxed before. Even in movies it seemed fake, over acting and stigmatised with pain – kinda like seeing a childbirth scene. Honestly, is it really that bad?
The Nad’s infomercial had Sue using the product on real life people, very precisely smearing on the product and quickly ripping off the cloth. Perhaps to this day it’s one of the smoothest waxing methods I have ever seen in my life and trust, I have seen many a waxing method in my life.
This is the face you make when you know something is gonna hurt but you can’t let it show. Relatable.
Whether the actors in the infomercials were paid extra to not cry, or it was genuinely painless, it inspired me as a young adult to keep as still as possible while getting a wax. To this day you will never see me flinch nor let water leak from my eye while getting waxed.
Nope, not painful at all.
Catchy slogans
They really tried to revolutionise the hair removal business by trying to not use the words ‘wax’, ‘depilate’, ‘pluck’, ‘strip hairs’, and ‘smearing sugar over your body and ripping each strand from the root’. So they went with what they thought was natural for their brand: “I got Nadded!”
Me: Excuse me police officer!
Police: What seems to be the problem ma’am?
Me: *holds out bare arms* I just got Nadded.
Police: You’re under arrest for trying to create a new adjective!
Me: noooOOoooOoo lol
Look at those tasty products!
Keeping it in the family
Sue created this product for her daughters, so who better to help her sell it than her now bald-armed offspring. The majority of the rave reviews are from her raven-haired girls, who with huge smiles and playful giggles claim that it’s the best product since… ever? And they’ve used since they could… remember?
The daughters of the Nad’s matriarch.
In one infomercial one of Sue’s daughters is playing part of a crispy tanned fantasy couple, both lying on the hot summer beach with their rock hard abs and hairless torsos. The shoots include lots of skin-on-skin stroking, seemingly in the hopes of moving the brand from “homely” to “sexy”.
Fun fact: Nad’s was named after Sue’s daughter (presumably the most hairy one), which is one of the most maternal things you could ever do as a mother. A family that Nad’s together, stays together, unless flushed with warm water and wiped carefully to dissolve any sticky residue.
One of the Nads daughters, presumably post-Nads.
Delicious
One of the marketing angles for the product was that it was made with natural ingredients. In a segment they even threatened to eat the product right in front of our eyes. I didn’t believe it – but there they went! Dipping their finger in it and putting it in their mouths. Going by their website and new commercials, it looks like they don’t encourage you to try eat it anymore, maybe they got sued after too many customers tried to eat the Nad’s AFTER they used it.
Mmm, pixelated Nad’s.
Surprise!
One of the many iterations of the infomercial featured a couple of American women talking about rummaging through their friend’s grubby bathroom cabinet – as you do – and screaming “YOU HAVE NAD’S???” I’m always rummaging through my friends bathrooms and screaming over my shoulder “YOU HAVE HANNIGANS HEMORRHOID CREAM??”
Then, in an incredible twist, Sue turns up to surprise the two women! Omg it’s the creator of this wax that I’ve used a couple of times!! Ekkkk, sign my hairless chest! This was the infomercial that really sold Nad’s to the difficult to crack US market. Turns out early 2000s Americans hated body hair on women as much as Australians and New Zealanders did!
“You’ve got Nad’s!”, said nobody except these two women, ever.
Unwanted facial hair
If the evidence of real-life unedited video footage of women Nadding wasn’t enough to prove that it works, they also decided to turn heads of all the yet-to-be-woke early Y2K generation and bring out a woman who lived with excessive facial hair.
Sue and an American host sit at a table with another woman. She has something to show the host: she opens the front of her jacket pocket for some reason and pulls out a picture.
Crash zoom on the American host: “That is incredible!”
Mary Ann Roth lived with long facial hair around her chin and lip. She had accepted this was her life and didn’t see the point in dealing with constant removal and upkeep just to keep everyone else in her life happy. One day, Mary Ann’s mother gave her a jar of Nad’s and a magazine article about Sue – Mary Ann faxed Sue and the creator of Nad’s invited her straight over for a Nadding session.
She Nadded Mary Ann’s face for us right on camera, wowing us with a before and after. Mary Ann’s subtle delivery of her comments are the best part of this infomercial. With a very practised, fake smile she says “My mother… was so ecstatic and happy… Yes it was worth it to see my mother’s face.” Ahh the things we do just to make our mothers happy.
Mary Ann Roth – pre and post-Nads!
Since the launch of Nad’s, Sue Ismeil has created a $42 million dollar beauty empire, winning multiple Women in Business awards, funding over half a million dollars for research into the connection between hormones and depression in women, and donating thousands to charitable causes. She also personally donated $10,000 to a family whose daughter suffered from a large birthmark and excessive hair covering 40% of her face. Not bad for a little jar of sticky green syrup.
The Nad’s infomercial was my first introduction to hair removal. These days I wax and thread monthly but recently have been inspired to grow out my armpit hair. I’ve tried everything on the market but something inside me stops me ever reaching for the Nad’s on the supermarket shelf. The suspicious Sally in me was always taught to never trust anything in an informercial – I know that glitter star-wipe from the before and after images are just optical distractions. Those steak knives? They will go blunt. That ladder, it won’t transform and that hair removal product? That can’t be eaten.
Keep going!
Shayne Carter during the She Speeds video shoot by John Collie.
Shayne Carter during the She Speeds video shoot by John Collie.
Before Rachael King was an author and a puller-together of literary festivals, she was a bass player in a heap of bands. At the start, she was a schoolgirl rocking in the Battling Strings, opening for the Chills and other 1980s Flying Nun bands, including Straitjacket Fits. Reading Shayne Carter’s memoir Dead People I Have Known got her thinking.
There was a power failure the night the Straitjacket Fits played in Auckland for the first time. I was there at the Gluepot, and Look Blue Go Purple were playing first. While everything went black and the guitars and keyboard cut out immediately, Lesley Paris’s drums pounded on for a few more seconds, as if the momentum of the song was too great to hold her back. We all gathered at the pub windows to watch Ponsonby swimming in darkness, strangers together in strangeness.
Then the lights returned — did LBGP finished their set or were they out of time? — and the Straitjacket Fits came on. I don’t remember specifics, just a palpable feeling in the room of excitement at the power and charisma emanating from the stage. My grandmother’s gold watch slipped off my wrist that night, onto the sticky Gluepot floor. I found it when the bell rang and the lights blared at 11pm. To this day, the hands still read ten to eleven. Granny’s watch, slaughtered by ‘She Speeds’.
That was also when I first met Shayne Carter, in a flat in Herne Bay simply known as ‘Ardmore Road’, where I was introduced to the pleasures of whisky, sitting around shooting the shit, and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, which was on high rotate.
Shayne writes about that weekend in Dead People I Have Known. The flat was populated by members of various bands — Goblin Mix, the Bird Nest Roys and others, including my bandmate and friend Dave Saunders — and ‘a whole new squadron of girls’. I guess I was one of those girls, though I didn’t live there. It was 1987; I was 16, still a schoolgirl, and took the bus home on Sunday afternoon to my comfortable family home on the North Shore. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was to hang out with the bands I’d crushed on, how kind and welcoming they all were to a kid from Birkenhead, who showed up on the doorstep every weekend with $10 in her pocket. Once, I went home with a black eye, after a drunk guy with green hair had tossed an empty vodka bottle aside and my face got in the way.
Battling Strings at the Huntly power station. Image: Alastair Reid.
I was a teenage bassist in a rock band. My band Battling Strings was so young we were a novelty: the kid brothers and sister of the scene. We were looked on less as a support band and more as a mascot, and as such opened for shows at the Gluepot, the Windsor Castle, the Rising Sun and various other long-forgotten venues and pubs, despite being three or four years below the legal drinking age.
There’s a clip on YouTube of the Battling Strings. I’m wearing a shiny blue vintage dress, with bright red, messy hair and flushed cheeks. There’s an enthusiastic crowd at the Auckland University ‘caff’, and Andy Moore plays the whole song with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Dave wears a 60s button-up shirt with massive collars and a hippy waistcoat, and Mike Shepherd flicks the long fringe of a suspiciously mullet-like hairdo out of his eyes as he drums.
Most of our songs, derivative of the older bands, were 2 to 3 minute-long three-chord anthems. We opened for the Bird Nest Roys and Goblin Mix, for the Chills, the Screaming Blue Messiahs, and, when they came back to Auckland for the second time, the Straitjacket Fits, downstairs in a tiny sweaty club on Lorne Street. It felt as though the dripping ceiling was only a foot above us as we played. We kept our heads down, intent on our instruments, sometimes our backs to the audience. The hotter it was, the easier it was to play, because sweaty fingers slide over bass strings better than cold ones. We were in our own world when we played, loud, and I’d glance up occasionally to see faces lit by the stage lights or silhouettes standing by the bar.
Once, we were invited to play at Russell Brown’s leaving party at the Rising Sun, when I was still just 15. For years after, I thought it had been his birthday party, because someone offered me cake. I have a sweet tooth and have always been greedy so I ate two pieces. It was strangely textured, but also delicious. Later, when we played, I remember thinking how drunk I felt even though I’d only had one beer. I ended up in a swirl in a corner somewhere, making out with the singer from fellow teen band Crunchy Something.
Police regularly turned up on those nights to scour for underage drinkers. They would emerge out of the gloom in their white helmets, do a turn around the room and leave. So long as I hung back without hiding, and kept my mouth shut on my braces, I would get away with it, probably because I was tall and knew I looked older than I was.
Battling Strings. Image: supplied.
Maybe that’s why around that time, I discovered I wasn’t being looked on as a kid any more. Men in bands started showing an interest in me, men in their 20s, who probably should have known better. I kissed one bass player out on tour, and his bandmate was so pissed off about it, that it hadn’t been him, that he hit my head with a kitchen cupboard door in Palmerston North.
That was the only aggression I encountered though – most of the attention was kind of sweet.I remember sitting on a deck at a Ponsonby party one night, while the two guitarists of a band both fought to put their arm around me and tell me how much they liked me. It baffled me, but I went with it. I’d never been the pretty one at school. Boys my own age certainly weren’t interested in me, and I wasn’t interested in them. For a small time, before I got a boyfriend and started spending my weekends elsewhere, I moved from crashing on the couch at Ardmore Road into one of the bedrooms. The occupant was 26, impossibly old.
Shayne Carter on stage at the Carlton in Christchurch (photo Rachael King)
I remember Shayne sinking into the couch that weekend, aloof and glamorous in a black leather jacket. He was from Dunedin, which I’d never been to, but which I knew to be the pinnacle of cool, where bands sprang from the sacred loam and made magic. Perhaps I read into him an air of darkness as well. I knew a vague version of what had happened to the Doublehappys, how the guitarist Wayne Elsey had been killed in an accident while larking about on a train, but the story, while relatively fresh then, was murky, and nobody asked for details. It was already taking its place as one of the great tragedies of New Zealand music mythology, helped along by the singular beauty of ‘Randolph’s Going Home’, the song Shayne wrote about Wayne with Peter Jefferies soon after.
One of the many strengths in Shayne’s book is his ability to nail a person with a few words. His portrait of Peter is affectionate but zeroes in on his idiosyncrasies, and those of his brother Graeme Jefferies, who I went on to play with in my next band, the Cakekitchen. He describes Graeme’s deep voice, 27 inch waist, and how he was someone who “stood too close to you, and when he said something an obscure amusement would play along his lips”, which was true. His brief portrait of a young Martin Phillipps is inspired: “He sounded like he’d been driven all around Otago Peninsula while recovering from dental drugs… with his heavy lidded eyes he was a stoned boy genius, out of it on comics, garage rock and full moons over water.”
I met Martin for the first time at the beginning of that same year, 1987, when I was working a summer job in a stationery shop in Three Lamps, Ponsonby. When I applied for the job I had tied my hair back neatly, and worn a 1960s cotton frock with respectable slip-on shoes. Once I had the job, I showed my true colours — shaggy hair flying, the same frock, but with old men’s pyjama bottoms underneath them, and scuffed suede desert boots. I was being paid less than three dollars an hour so I figured I should be myself while doing it. Martin came into the shop more than you would think anyone would need to go into a stationery shop, and he always seemed nervous but keen to chat. When I showed up at the Gluepot for our support slot for the Chills, he did a double-take, and kept saying what a coincidence it was to see me there, the girl from the stationery shop. At the time I had thought he’d offered us the gig because of our chats over the counter and that he must know who I was, but I guess I was wrong. Maybe I just reminded him of the girls back in Dunedin.
The music scene in those early days, as Shayne writes it, is dominated by boys and men. When he writes about his girlfriends, sometimes with self-pity and bitterness, sometimes with the heart of a Brontë, he is careful not to name them. I understand the urge to keep those details private for their sake, but the result is that women are quite abstract in the book. Shayne has played music with women over the years, but the few other names mentioned — Celia Mancini, Jane Dodd, the members of Look Blue Go Purple, Jay Clarkson — probably aren’t enough to dispel the idea that the Flying Nun scene was a boys’ club.
Shayne describes an early review he wrote for Critic, in which he called LBGP “annoyingly coy”, as “a little sexist… as if everyone should be up there flopping out their cocks.” He says he had a few things to learn from “the feminist wave going on around us. The movement in the eighties said a lot about equality and folk having the right to do what they chose with their bodies, about the objectification of people, about their duties in designated roles.”
There were a lot of women around, who I looked up to, whose style I emulated — strong, feminist women. But the men were feminists too. I feel fortunate that at such a formative age I was always treated as an equal, and in general women in the scene were rarely objectified — you only have to look at photos and videos from that time to see it’s true. It was before make-up artists and hairdressers became mandatory at New Zealand on Air funded video shoots, for the boys as well as the girls (as Shayne discovered with the video for ‘Bad Note for a Heart’). I wore no make up, didn’t shave anything, and nor was I expected to by the men around me.
And yet, as much as I feel women were so much a part of the scene, when I look back on all the tours I went on, with all my bands, from the late 80s to the mid-90s, and whom we toured the country with — Straitjacket Fits, Headless Chickens (pre-Fiona MacDonald), Bailter Space, Jean Paul Sartre Experience and others — I was always the only woman. Always. (I remember watching the Straitjacket Fits from backstage at the Carlton in Christchurch on one of those tours. It was the first time I’d seen a Flying Nun band treated with such adulation, by girls whose upturned faces gazed beatifically up at Shayne as he played. I sensed a seismic shift and took a photo as a record.)
People on the street outside the pub would tell me I was a good girlfriend for carrying my boyfriend’s guitar. Often when people not in the scene (the squares, as Shayne would say) heard I was in a band, they assumed I must be the singer. When I told them I played bass, they assumed it was for an ‘all girl band’, because surely I couldn’t be good enough to play with the blokes. Even then, I existed inside a feminist bubble. Most of the ‘women in rock’ celebrated in New Zealand were singers in commercial bands or solo artists. I’d love to see something around the alternative women in rock, the silent doers behind the bass, drums, guitars and keyboards.
I remember getting enraged one night in the early 2000s when a man in a bar asked me why there were so many female bass players. The question he should have been asking was: why are there so few women who play instruments in bands, that those who do, stick out? If there truly were as many women playing bass or drums, or guitars, anything other than singing, as there are men, then it wouldn’t even warrant a mention. I asked him to name ten bands with female bass players. He couldn’t. Let’s face it: most bass players are men.
Audioculture recently published photos from a precious archive of the late 80s Auckland music scene by Brian Murphy. Shayne is there, in the Station Hotel along with my boyfriend and bandmate at the time Robert Key, at a Skeptics gig. One of the photos is a posed shot of the Cakekitchen — Robert, me, and Graeme Jefferies. We all look bereft. I vaguely remember an instruction to “look sad”. In fact we were mostly a happy band, until we weren’t, at which point I left. I was 19, already feeling I’d had a lengthy rock career.
Graeme Jefferies has also written a memoir. In it, he misremembers the circumstances around the break-up of that first iteration of the band (he went on to keep playing under the Cakekitchen moniker, with musicians coming and going). I don’t know if he really believes that is what happened — that Robert and I broke up and things became awkward between us — or if he is deliberately fudging the truth, that Robert and I were still very much together, and I left because I found Graeme’s behaviour problematic. Robert left soon after, but we stayed together until he went overseas. And it made me think about who holds the power when it comes to collective memory: it’s always the person with the keyboard. Because their version of the truth is the one that goes out into the world. History written by the victors, sometimes by those with shaky memories, or sinister motives, or self-delusion.
Shayne Carter on Jutland St, circa 2019. (Photo: Esta de Jong)
As the title suggests, Shayne has lost a lot of people, to illness, and more tragically, to suicide, drugs, and misadventure. A pivotal moment in the book is the death of Wayne Elsey, on the train, that great core myth of New Zealand music. Shayne finally lays out the bare facts of what actually happened that night and its immediate aftermath. The scene is horrifying, but clear-eyed, almost clinical. For a reader, it is all the more gut-punching for its starkness. One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever received was to “describe the coffin not the grief”: don’t try and put into words the emotion attached to a scene. Just put yourself in that mindset and write what you see. How he managed to put himself back there so vividly I don’t know. The effect is devastating. ‘Randolph’s Going Home’ has taken on a whole new power, as, if you listen closely, it too lays out the bare facts.
The best thing about the book is Shayne’s ability to fully recreate a scene as if he is standing right there experiencing it, and we are standing there with him. Perhaps others will remember things differently, and Shayne is just the one who has written it down, and his version is now the truth. But he does seem to have the memory of an elephant. I asked him if he used his diaries to put things in place, establish timelines, but he burned them before he even started writing the book. The rest of us can only hope to remember even recent conversations with such clarity — these days, whenever I see Shayne, I always seem to say at least one thing to which he responds, “yeah, I remember you telling me that.”
He has said that after meeting his editor-to-be Ashleigh Young, at her suggestion, he set out to write an “impolite book”. But he has also written a compassionate, moving, dense, funny book, crediting Janet Frame with the inspiration to take haunting fragments of memory and turn them into art. The chapters about his family, and growing up in stew-smelling Brockville, are breath-taking, New Zealand Gothic at its best. When Kim Hill said to him in an interview recently, “you were an odd child,” his indignant response came: “I wasn’t odd, I was normal. The rest of the world was odd.” Lucky for us then, that he writes about the world’s oddities from his normal, clear-eyed perspective. Maybe all those years without alcohol have made him the perfect vessel to write a memoir, especially in the music world, where nobody can remember anything to contradict him.
Dead People I Have Known, by Shayne Carter (VUP, $40) is available at Unity Books.