Advertising: Persil washes greener than green

Here's something psychological. A commercial clearly designed in somewhere like the Tavistock Institute (Regressive Fantasies Department). And talk about touchy-feely. It involves nudity, androgyny and talking in tongues. But it's for Persil, so it's perfectly all right to let your wife or servants see it.

Persil is a master brand, an ancient Unilever property that people trust and still invest with magical powers. When, very occasionally in Persil's long history, things go a bit wrong – as with Persil Power – elaborate reparations are made and the public is forgiving. They know Persil couldn't mean any harm.

There is, however, a long-term problem with detergents. While no one really wants to wash things with hopeless eco-friendly Romanian-style powders, there's a bit of a worry about all those phosphates in the rivers and, nearer home, next to your skin. I suspect this all comes up in Persil's research – we love you Persil, we'll forgive you anything, but you're a detergent and we want to feel all holistic and moist, like those women who bathe in a ring of scented candles.

So there's a new Persil and they're advertising it furiously, in a most singular way. A fantasy animated way that's somewhere between Teletubbies and Yellow Submarine. It's a subconscious infantile world where everything is nice and natural. The naturalness, the greenness, comes from aloe vera, which is some sort of plant mush they put in skin creams and cosmetics. Here it's a magical green Persil that makes tropical plants sprout and causes naked sexless types with funny haircuts (it's a bit like Camden) to blirp and twitter.

The lovely tropical plants grow bright flowers; they're shirts and dresses and Y-fronts, and the happy gibbery creatures put them on. Kiddies lie down underneath. A creature with a prehensile tail dances around in her new dress. "It's kinder to your skin," so they say. "A drop of nature, awash with kindness, to make your laundry bloom."

This is a very important commercial. Forget all the ads that have come to terms with modern life or advanced special effects. This is a commercial for a gigantic brand that's come to terms with the inner life – the tweety, bleepy baby stuff of psycho-semiotics – and used it to address all those free-form worries about chemicals by getting oops upside your head.