Like many beauty stories, mine begins with Marilyn Monroe. Starting with her ample peach fuzz, which she embraced for its flattering effect on camera. She slathered petroleum jelly under her makeup and was partial to rich, heavy creams. As someone with PCOS-induced facial hair and a lifelong fondness for Vaseline-adjacent occlusives to seal in every last drop of moisture, I was curious—did Marilyn and I have something in common?
Monroe removed her makeup religiously with Pond’s Cold Cream. That’s all the endorsement I needed before I was scanning the shelves of my drugstore, unearthing a jar from the dusty recesses. For $8.99, I was the owner of American cosmetic history.
Pond’s has a long list of fans from Dolly Parton to Sabrina Carpenter—plus any grandma worth her pearls. As I unscrewed the mint-green lid, I inhaled a floral scent that transported me right back to my grandmother’s vanity. The texture—slick and brazenly greasy—felt almost transgressive in the era of gel cleansers and micellar waters. Certainly, a cream so fragrant and thick would be an invitation to breakouts.
What began as an experiment developed into full-on dependence. Pond’s Cold Cream came to do most of the heavy lifting in my night-time skincare routine as a makeup remover and moisturizer. Let me tell you, it melts away the day’s grime—no stripping, no breakouts. It’s even simple enough to glob lazily on my face after a long night out. Judging by the fact that a jar sells every 15 seconds in the U.S., I’m hardly alone in my devotion. “There’s a reason it has such a cult following,” according to Dr. Rachel Nazarian, a board-certified dermatologist at Schweiger Dermatology Group in New York City. “For some skin types, this…can be a gentle way to remove other oil-based products and creams from your face.”
The cream was dreamed up by Theron T. Pond, a pharmacist who introduced witch hazel to the world as a healing skin tonic called Golden Treasure. In 1904, he combined its soothing powers with a beeswax-borax emulsion made with mineral oil, and introduced Pond’s Extract Cold Cream as an oil-based and cooling makeup remover. Its companion was the lighter, water-based Pond’s Vanishing Cream.
In 1913, Ponds pitched the Vanishing Cream for daytime and the Cold Cream for night, declaring, “Every skin needs two creams.” It was a simple blueprint for the modern skincare routine. Sales tripled. From there, Ponds expanded the concept, offering more elaborate regimens in tidy sequences of two, three, and four products. And just like that, the notion of a step-by-step skincare routine was born.
By the 1920s, Pond’s was losing ground to Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, with their pricier, more glamorous salon products. As European skincare gained cachet and women increasingly equated cost with quality, Pond’s seemed a smidge pedestrian. To elevate their image, Ponds enlisted American socialites and European aristocrats, claiming, “three of the reigning queens of Europe, six princesses, titled ladies, and leaders of American society” all used Pond’s. The strategy worked.
Though the formula has evolved (the witch hazel is long gone), Pond’s Cold Cream remains a drugstore staple. “If you’re someone who wears a lot of makeup, this is a really easy way to clean the skin before you actually clean the skin,” says Dr. Nazarian. The application is appealingly simple: lather a dollop on the face and neck, let it marinate (the longer, the better), and either rinse or wipe it off with a soft cloth. Dr. Nazarian recommends rinsing it off, but I prefer to treat it as a nighttime mask and let it take residence on my face until I can’t bear it any longer. Then I swipe it off with a dry towel or tissue to achieve maximum moisturizing benefits.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of Pond’s as a relic and started seeing it as a non-negotiable. It doesn’t promise a collagen boost, glass skin, or some dramatic, viral transformation. It just gets the job done. And in an age of salmon sperm facials and $300 serums, there’s something deeply satisfying about that.
Merritt Johnson is the Audience Growth Manager at Air Mail
