Pour Amour

means

For Love

and at top right it said:

Pour Amour

is

For Love

"There are two things about that ad," I said.

Wolfe grunted and turned a page.

"One thing," I said, "is the name itself. To sixty-four and seven-tenths per cent of the women seeing it, it will suggest 'paramour,' and the percentage would be higher if more of them knew what a paramour is. I won't decry American womanhood. Some of my best friends are women. Very few of them want to be or have paramours, so you couldn't come right out and name a perfume that. Put it this way. They see the ad, and they think, So they have the nerve to suggest their snazzy old perfume will get me a paramour! Ill show 'em! What do they think I am? Half an ounce, ten bucks. The other thing-"

"One's enough," he growled.

"Yes, sir. The second thing, so many bottles. That's against the rules. The big idea in a perfume ad is to show only one bottle, to give the impression that it's a scarce article and you'd better hurry up and get yours. Not Pour Amour. They say, Come on, we've got plenty and it's a free country and every woman has a right to a paramour, and if you don't want one prove it. It's an entirely new approach, one hundred per cent American, and it seems to be paying off, it and the contest together."

I had expected to get the desired results by that time, but all he did was sit and turn pages. I took a breath.

"The contest, as you probably know since you look at ads some, is a pip. A million dollars in cash prizes. Each week for nearly five months they have furnished a description of a woman--I might as well give you the exact specifications, since you've been training my memory for years --'a woman recorded in non-fictional history in any of its forms, including biography, as having used cosmetics.' Twenty of them in twenty weeks. This was the description of Number One: