Be Careful How You Use It: The Story of Hai Karate

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Today, men’s perfume is as fancy, extravagant and costly as the larger women’s market, but several decades ago – when men’s perfume was stubbornly referred to as ‘aftershave’ or, if especially poncy, ‘cologne’ – things were different. Back then, it would have rugged, manly names and ad campaigns to match, be it Old Spice’s surfing action or Brut’s ads with boxer Henry Cooper, who no one was ever going to confuse with an effete pretty boy and so gave reassurance that there was nothing girly about aftershave, right down to the instruction to ‘splash it all over’ rather than dab it here and there. The difference and the message was stark – effeminate men wore flowery perfume, real men wore aftershave. Even the name spoke to its manliness – you literally used it as a post-shave balm rather than a perfume, even if it stung on application to freshly shaved skin.

Aftershave was generally a more basic, no-nonsense product that pitched itself less on the actual smell and more on functionality. It was designed to freshen you up after a hard session of sporting manliness. Less overtly – though only slightly less overtly – it was sold on how likely it was to get you laid.

I think of 1970s aftershave and I think of shows like Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads?, Bob and Terry getting ready for a night out, dressed in their best suits and doubtless drenched in Tabac or English Leather or Old Spice, hair brill creamed and out on the hunt for dolly birds. Aftershave wasn’t just about sex – it was a mark of faux sophistication and the sign that a night out was a special event. But the underlying inference was always that the right aftershave was a knicker-dropper – an aphrodisiac that would turn the heads of otherwise uninterested bits of crumpet. That all the other blokes in the pub might have also splashed it all over was an inconvenience not gone into.

How upfront this suggestion was depended on the scent and its perceived demographics. Brut didn’t go that way at all, unless Henry Cooper had designs on the metrosexual footballer Kevin Keegan, his sometime advertising co-star. Old Spice focused on the manly sporting activities but hinted at the romance that would follow. Denim was more blatant – pitched at “the man who doesn’t have to try too hard” and featuring female hands sliding inside a man’s shirt – both characters faceless to allow maximum audience identification.

Then, as now, perfume ads took themselves laughably seriously – when you are trying to pitch a sense of sophistication and style, there is little room for humour. However, one aftershave and one campaign took a rather different approach. Hai Karate became famous for its ludicrous ads that showed women driven mad with desire by a mere whiff of the scent, becoming so voracious and man-eating that the hapless wearer had to fight them off.

Hai Karate was launched in 1967 by Leeming, a division of Pfizer, and was formulated by Michael Pickthall. It was sold as a mid-level aftershave – not the cheapest, but comfortably affordable as a Christmas gift, which I suspect was how most men ended up with bottles of aftershave back then. It had various scent variations over the years, including Oriental Spice and Oriental Lime for those with more exotic tastes, and by pure luck found itself part of the fashionable zeitgeist in the 1970s when martial arts fever swept the world. Prior to this, ‘hai karate’ probably sounded Japanese and mysterious, but in a post-Bruce Lee world, it found itself linked to a burgeoning martial arts pop culture. Even without the advertising, Hai Karate probably sounded more cool than its rivals to teenage boys. Of course, these days, the scent would probably be criticised for orientalism and cultural appropriation, but such concerns were a long way off in the 70s.

On paper, the Hai Karate ads featuring sexually voracious women with no self-control sound outrageously sexist, and that’s often how they’ve been critiqued over the years by rent-a-quote talking heads on TV shows and the sort of newspaper columnists that are only familiar with laughter on a theoretical level. But even in the 1970s, when sexism was rife across the media, the ads were clearly satirical. While the Denim ads seemed to take themselves very seriously, Hai Karate ads were deliberately absurd – in fact, they seem oddly subversive, poking fun at the po-faced and ludicrous aphrodisiac claims of rival brands. The catchphrase “be careful how you use it” hardly seemed designed to be taken seriously, and if anyone did, then more fool them.

The ads tend to feature nerdy, ordinary blokes rather than male models, the sort that you would never imagine women fighting over, and then make the whole scenario even more ludicrous as Mr Average has to use his laughably clumsy martial arts skills to fend off the attentions of the beautiful woman coming on to him, leaving chaos and destruction in his wake. The ads are sharply satirical and as they developed in the UK, they became part of a very British cultural movement that ranged from Carry On films to the Confessions films, where hapless, gormless blokes were either chasing girls unsuccessfully or finding themselves at the mercy of sexually predatory housewives. Thanks to a combination of culture and censorship, British sex films were always more smirk than smut, with sniggering slapstick rather than actual eroticism.

It made perfect sense then that the figurehead of the British Hai Karate campaign would be Valerie Leon, a veteran of the Carry On series and Bond movies, star of Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb and the film version of No Sex Please, We’re British. Leon was one of the most striking of the 1970s starlets – statuesque with big, hair, big eyes… big everything, in fact. She was almost cartoonishly sexy and had a domineering style about her that singled her out from the dolly birds of the time and made her a show-in for dominatrix roles in comedy sketches and movies – one of several women over the years to earn the ‘Miss Whiplash’ nickname.

Leon knew how to exaggerate her sexuality for comic effect and so was the perfect choice to appear in these ads. She made a great double-act with co-star Brian Miller, who is admirably straight-faced as the object of lust – the question remains if the two characters were supposed to be the same from ad to ad (in which case, he really needed to switch aftershave brands) or if each ad was a stand-alone narrative. I know, I know – I’m overthinking this.

The US ad campaign had a similar style but is less memorable, perhaps because it doesn’t quite match the absurdity of the British commercials – it has less of a cartoonish approach and so seems less gleefully satirical. But on both sides of the Atlantic, the joke continued to the product itself, which came with a self-defence instructional leaflet, and some odd spin-off merch. Most notable of these was the 7-inch flexidisc released in the US in 1977 called Sounds of Self Defense, which instructs the innocent Hai Karate wearer in how to fend off attacks from crazed women.

Like all things, Hai Karate had a shelf-life. The 1980s saw a backlash against what would become known as political incorrectness, and sexist aftershave commercials were soon to go the way of Benny Hill in a cultural purge – cancellation, as we might call it today. The fact that Hai Karate ads were mocking the whole macho concept to begin with was – and is – lost on many critics. And fashions change – what was cool once began to seem cheap and cheesy. The road from sophisticated luxury to downmarket tat is one that several brands have taken and once you fall out of fashion, you need to radically rebrand or die. Other scents rose for a new generation – notably Lynx and Axe, which became the horny teenage boy’s aftershave and deodorant of choice, thanks to ad campaigns that offered the same non-binding guarantee of sexual success that their predecessors had.

Still, you can’t keep an old brand down. Hai Karate has made two comebacks – once in 2014 and then again in 2021, when it was revived by Beauty Clear, who still sells it now. It allegedly still has the same formulation as it had in the 1970s. For those of you planning to go to a convention or other event where Valerie Leon is making an appearance, why not test it out and see if it still has the same effect on her?

DAVID FLINT

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