Watch your step, it's a blue eyeliner day

No 156: BOOTS No 7

The conventions of beauty-product advertising are very strict. You show beautiful girls, who often speak in a mysteriously robotic way, having been dubbed from American or Euro. You demonstrate the product's efficacy with simple graphics, and you end with a pack shot. Sometimes the younger brands will show two or three beautiful girls being playful together, mugging for the camera. But that's as far as it goes.

But Boots No7, always in the van of the wacky, irreverent movement, has now cast off for inner space. No girls. No, nothing much in these ads except some abstract effects and inner musings on the sound-track. The new No 7 commercials are pure mood, pure colour. We're inside a girlie head looking out onto a world of colourwash and dappling, while she feels her way to the make-up products that suit her mood or her task.

One treatment is gold - a sort of sepia gold with a distinct flickering- leaves effect. And she's in a summery, sexy, escape mood: "Today gold ... I like shimmer on my shoulders, the warm sun on my eyelids ... I'm sure they won't miss me at work." This is followed by the on-screen legend "No7, be extraordinary, not ordinary".

The other treatment is darker, represented by dark-blue horizontal wavy bars on-screen and tortured noises - stilettoed footsteps, a knife- sharpening sound; it's going to be a hard day. "Dark cold eyeliner this morning, brutal blue. What I'm asking you to do is leave the company. Hair in a bun? No, too obvious." You need the right make-up to sack somebody. No7 helps you express your every mood, you fabulous creature with your quirky make-up.

It's bold stuff. I can't see this getting past the marketing review committees of any of the big American or French cosmetic houses. But I'm sure they'll watch it with interest. Funny it's so different from the wonderfully stodgy, "caring" campaign for the Boots parent brand.