Either way might actually happen, but with any luck I’ll only have to do it once. Then I’ll know what to buy until the next time they change the products or the packaging.
@Senegoid: Thanks for taking the time to dig that stuff up.
I do recall the effort to get openly discriminatory terms (“No Mexicans!”) out of advertising. And there has always been hand-wringing about “Oh Noes! the word police will sue us!”. American business in general loves to run around in a perpetual state of terror over frivolous lawsuits. Are there some? Sure. Should there be fewer? Sure. Are they a significant scourge upon the land? Heck no. Especially not compared to the depradations of business large and small upon the ordinary citizen or worker.
Up until last week I was a condo association President here in SoFL. I dealt with RE law and ADA and FHA crap all the time. Yes, there are ADA compliance law firms shakedown artists out there scouring the internet for bogus stuff to sue over. But you’ve got to be really, really stupid over the top in your advertising (“No Mexicans!”) to fall into their clutches.
How long ago was this still used? It sounds so jarring to me, like something I’d read about in history books (“Irish need not apply”) but then I remember how recently things like interracial marriages were prohibited and how not-that-long before my living memory the Civil Rights movement happened. Up here in Chicago, I’m much more aware of the grim history of redlining and less overt, but equally harmful, methods of segregation.
As to the OP, I confess, I can muster no outrage. It seems like good marketing and advertising to me. Brands regularly fiddle with language and advertising to target a larger and larger group of people. (See: moving away from “diet” drinks to “ten” and now “zero” drinks in order to shed some of the “feminine” baggage of the word “diet.”) “Normal” is a word that has a lot of assumptions behind it (maybe not as obvious as “flesh” for the pre-1962 Crayola crayons, but there are suppositions), and if choosing another word makes just a little bit more of your market open to your product, why not?
This isn’t to say these choices should only be run by market dynamics, but there is a solid market reasoning behind it and it also is more inclusionary.
I’ve bought the shampoo for oily hair all my life… because I have oily hair. Was I supposed to be offended my hair isn’t considered ‘normal’? Who gaf? It’s the ultimate in first world problems.
No, I’d say the ultimate in first world problems prize has to go to the people complaining about the term being changed.
Also, I’m sure you know, but “oily” vs “non-oily” isn’t the real issue here.
They’re both first world problems. You’d think the pandemic would have given us something real to worry about, but it’s just left people with even more time on their hands.
Actually I don’t think I do know. I buy shampoo and it’s usually advertised as for dry/normal/oily hair, plus an ever expanding list of more specialised versions that the advertisers come up with. When I was a teenager I bought facial products for oily skin, 20 years later I buy the ones for dry skin. What is the problem exactly?
Yes, that’s exactly going to happen. All adjectives will be lined up against the wall and shot, along with any collaborating nouns and adverbs. The language will go through a dark age of poverty consisting of nothing but the words ‘dude’, ‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’, ‘literally’, and ‘figuratively’, and unfortunately they will all be so diluted that we’ll be reduced to grunting and pointing to make ourselves understood.
I mean, dude, come on.
People with straight hair are weird mutated freaks whose hair is very different from the ancestral condition of Homo sapiens yet they are one marketed to as being “normal” while people with typical Homo sapiens hair are othered by branding, with terms like “difficult”.
Eta: in case it isn’t clear, I don’t actually think anyone is a “weird mutated freak” but my point is that when you call one thing “normal” you imply anything else is “abnormal”, like “normal marriage” vs gay marriage or “normal women” vs trans women.
Why ask a yes or no question when you were very clearly prepared to disagree with either answer?
They’re not concerned about offending people with oily hair. They’re concerned about offending people of different backgrounds (African-American, I presume) who, by and large, will never have “normal” hair as compared to a white person. It’s just one more way of being told ‘you’re not normal’.
I despise this argument. Most of us are able to concern ourselves with multiple things. I can both try to do my best to contain the spread of the virus AND do my best to keep racism in check.
The ‘but there’s a pandemic going on, we have bigger things to worry about’ excuse, to me, is very similar to ‘we just had a school shooting, this is neither the time nor the place to discuss gun control’.
Excuses excuses excuses.
There’s always going to be a reason, valid or otherwise, to avoid discussing something that may require change on your part.
Right? Like, what are you expecting a hair care product company to do about the pandemic? 
How about ‘there’s a pandemic going on, so we should explain to Unilever that this is not the time to go changing their labeling, how dare they try to be inclusive during this difficult time’?
Are you sure? All the other great apes have straight hair, it might just be a reversion to the ancestral type.
Anyway, it’s pretty clear in this case that ‘normal’ is a synonym for ‘average’; they’re not trying to tell the >50% of their market who buy other versions that we are abnormal. And I’ve never seem shampoo for ‘difficult’ hair. Take a look here:
Technically we’re all weird mutated freaks. That’s what allows evolution to happen.
I can’t find the original thread in which I proposed these pronouns, but there was feedback to capitalize the E in analogy with I. If the capitalization is not to your taste, you can certainly start using it in lower case, e. The whole point of this pronoun exercise is to come up with a pronoun scheme that doesn’t require anyone’s approval or designation.
I have no problem with this either way but it never occurred to me that anyone uses the “normal” descriptor as in comparison with other peoples’ hair (or skin or whatever). I mean, all I’ve ever known is the hair I have to deal with. Growing up mine was always dry(thanks to the contribution of my homo sapien kin 
) and I bought products accordingly. Just for my information, are products that are specifically for Black hair categorized the same way?
It’s not an argument, it’s an observation. People in the first world have too much time on our hands and not enough real problems, so we end up worrying about trivial crap.
If I was going to argue against this, it would be that all these small changes add up to a lot of unnecessary cognitive load, similar to the constant updates to operating systems, software, apps etc that necessitate constantly relearning things you already knew how to do. I’m old enough now to find it annoying, and I foresee that at some point it will become impossible to keep up.
A)What you consider trivial, other’s might not.
B)All this reaction, similarly the reactions to Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head is people getting all worked up over voluntary changes made by the business. Not due to any backlash, but rather due to the company noticing something problematic and proactively taking corrective steps.
Think about that. They’re voluntarily saying ‘we were wrong, we’re fixing it’ and the response is a big FU.
You want to talk about first world problems. Talk about being offended that a company is trying to be less offensive and more inclusive. There’s a god damn pandemic going on right now, maybe don’t worry about shampoo labeling (see what I did there).
You missed or ignored the point I was making.
You have become accustomed to having consumer goods marketed directly to you. You have the convenience of easy shopping choices because companies treat you as the default customer and develop products around your needs.
This policy is being changed and you are asking for other people to sympathize with you because of the extra effort you will now have to spend figuring out which consumer products to buy.
In my previous post, I was indirectly pointing out that there are millions of people who have had to make this extra effort all their lives because they do not fit inside the “normal” parameters that you do.
So my implied question is whether you have been offering them the sympathy for this problem that you are now asking people to extend to you? Or is this a problem that you’ve ignored until it affected you personally? And if so, why should you expect other people to pay attention to this problem unless it affects them personally?
When they came for the adjectives, I said nothing because I was not an adjective…
Oily, dry, and average. The first two are already commonly in such use. The third would be far more accurate than ‘normal’.
The use of ‘normal’ to mean ‘average’ has been bugging me for years in contexts having nothing to do with humans. It’s common, for instance, in discussing temperatures. It would be wildly abnormal if the temperature every day for any extended period were always the average temperature!
As they’ve always been ambiguously singular or plural, we already have them. And if there’s really a good reason to know which, there are plenty of ways to indicate that, none of which would include another set of gender-neutral pronouns. Most of the time there isn’t such a reason.
I use it sometimes. But I don’t claim to be popular.
The people who are being defined as “abnormal”.
The ones who are being defined as “normal” very often don’t notice.
Nobody has said that the problem is with the words “oily” or “dry”.
Normal is not a synonym for average!!
(goes and sulks behind a dictionary)
Yeah, that’s the part that’s annoying. A company can manufacture their product in sweatshops, screw their employees, and pollute the environment with excess packaging, but if they fix some trivial linguistic issue, they get praise for being socially conscious. What a crock.