Nivea Creme

Nivea Creme is a white cream in a flat blue tin, and for much of the twentieth century it was the default moisturiser of Europe and far beyond. It is dense, faintly scented and slow to sink in, and it is meant for everything: face, hands, elbows, the cracked skin of winter. Beiersdorf says it sells more than four tins every second, in more than 170 countries.

Before it, creams separated. The problem was solved in Hamburg by three men: Oscar Troplowitz, the pharmacist who had bought Paul Beiersdorf's laboratory in 1890; Paul Gerson Unna, a dermatologist; and Isaac Lifschütz, a chemist whose emulsifier, drawn from lanolin, the wax in sheep's wool, held oil and water together indefinitely. Lifschütz patented it in 1900 as Eucerit, 'beautiful wax'. Beiersdorf built a cream on it that could be made in quantity and kept on a shelf, and in December 1911 put it on sale under a name the company had used for six years, from the Latin for snow.

The first tin was yellow and decorated in the art nouveau manner. In 1925 Beiersdorf's head of advertising, Juan Gregorio Clausen, replaced it with a plain blue tin and white lettering, a turn towards the clarity of the Bauhaus years, and told customers that the contents remained the same, 'as it cannot be improved'. The tin has barely changed since, and turned one hundred in 2025.

The company has been through worse than redesigns. Its Hamburg plants were largely destroyed by bombing at the end of the Second World War, and the Nivea trademark was seized in many of the countries where it sold, rights Beiersdorf later bought back. The cream has been adjusted to new science and new rules more than once, but Beiersdorf describes it as essentially the 1911 recipe, and its Hamburg plants now turn out around a million and a half metal tins a day.