Many food and drink brands are still marketed today as exotic pleasures; some long-running products—Fry’s Turkish Delight, for example—even continue to sell themselves via an Orientalist mystique that now seems quite outmoded. This will never happen again with cigarettes, of course, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see it tried with cannabis if it’s ever legalised.
Salome Ideal was a brand of gold-tipped scented cigarette sold to American women from 1915 to the late 1940s. I’ve not been able to find out how they were scented but the figure on the pack is a flagrant borrowing from photos of Maud Allan’s scandalous Dance of the Seven Veils. This page has a couple of ad designs.
Maud Allan c. 1908.
Emil Cardinaux poster from 1914 may have been for the same brand of cigarette or for a different one of the same name. Cardinaux was a Swiss advertising artist so it’s possible there was a Salomé cigarette for European smokers. More of Cardinaux’s poster art can be seen in this Pinterest collection.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive