Vaseline Original Petroleum Jelly

Vaseline Original Petroleum Jelly is a translucent, pale jelly in a squat plastic tub with a dark blue lid and a blue label. It has no smell and almost no colour, holds its shape in the tub, and melts to a clear oil on warm skin. It contains one ingredient, petrolatum, and is sold as a protective ointment for dry skin, chapped lips, minor cuts and burns.

Its origin is an oil field. In 1859 Robert Chesebrough, a young Brooklyn chemist whose business in whale-oil lamp fuel was being ruined by petroleum, travelled to Titusville, Pennsylvania, where America's first oil wells had just been drilled. The drillers cursed a waxy residue that clogged their pumps but rubbed it on their cuts and burns. Chesebrough took some home and learned to refine it into a clean, pale jelly.

In 1872 he patented 'a new and useful Product from Petroleum, which I have named Vaseline', made by filtering the residue of the oil still through bone charcoal. The patent offered it for leather, machinery and the hair; the public took it as a remedy. Chesebrough sold it by demonstration, burning his own skin with acid or flame before an audience and dressing the wound with the jelly. By 1874, it is recorded, shops were selling more than 1,400 jars a day. He lived to 96, and claimed to eat a spoonful daily.

The company he founded merged with Pond's in 1955 and passed to Unilever in 1987. The glass jar with its Blue Seal lid became a plastic tub, and the jelly is now described as triple-purified, but the substance is the one the patent describes. The name proved so successful that in many languages 'vaseline' simply means petroleum jelly, which is why the maker's advertisements have long insisted on the genuine article.