Bombril

Bombril is a pad of fine steel wool: a loose, palm-sized roll of hair-thin steel fibres, used dry or with soap and water to scour pans and to polish metal, glass and tiles. It is sold in a yellow plastic bag printed with a red oval in which the words Bom Bril stand in fat white letters, six pads to the 45-gram pack and eight to the larger one.

The pad was the first product of Abrasivos Bombril, founded in São Paulo on 14 January 1948 by Roberto Sampaio Ferreira. The company's account is that aluminium pans were then replacing iron ones in Brazilian kitchens, and that housewives could not keep them bright with ordinary sponges. The name runs together bom brilho, good shine. In its first year, the company says, 48,000 were sold, and its many uses gave it the slogan "1001 utilidades".

Advertisements from the early 1950s show the pad as a cylinder wound from steel wool, wrapped in an oval label and sold singly as "a esponja mágica" that cleans without scratching. Buyers were told to insist on the genuine one with the red label, because imitators had already arrived. In 1964 Bombril moved to a plastic bag of six, and in 1976 production left São Paulo for a works on the Via Anchieta in São Bernardo do Campo, which the company calls the largest steel wool factory in the world.

From 1978 the pad was sold on television by the actor Carlos Moreno as the Garoto Bombril, in a campaign the company says entered Guinness World Records in 1994 for its length. By then Bombril had become the everyday Brazilian word for steel wool of any make. The company has since passed through Italian ownership, three years under court administration and a return to the founder's son, but what comes out of the yellow bag is still a twist of fine steel for making aluminium shine.