The BLOG This Week

Here comes…The Death Appeal.

4 min readMay 31, 2019

This WORLD NO TOBACCO DAY, smokers of the world might have to say goodbye to the last good thing about cigarette…”The packaging”.

If WHO and the Secretariat of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control have their way, plain packaging of tobacco products could be in for good. In Australia and France already plain packaging enforced. UK and South Africa are amongst the other nations that are considering the same.

So; no more art on the 84 mm packet of your favorite poison breathers. Just the brand’s name, a deadly picture to please your eyes and possibly the pricing figures. No more of the iconic, tall letters of Marlboro, no more of he Dunhill signature, no more of Davidoff calligraphy, no more of the Wills Classics’ Blue Leaf imprint. Pretty soon, it is to be one, bland, uniform packaging for smokes. One uniform typeface, a no-design layout, and a vomit-summoning picture of a rotten human organ: the reality behind the smoky veil, laid bare for you.

Researchers have been suggesting since long, that plain packaging is an effective way to turn smokers away from the habit. That’s a given. A significant helping of cigarette’s charm comes from the intangible, imagined aura that advertisers have sold on smoke packaging since the beginning of time. They sold class, they sold style, they sold adventure, they sold sex, and they sold taste. They sold everything but cigarettes.

Chicago Ad legend Leo Burnett forwarded what was perhaps the most iconic cigarette campaign of all; the Marlboro Man. He realized selling smoking as the life-killing-habit it is, is of no profit. So he kick started the bandwagon of selling a lifestyle instead. Come to where the flavor is, his packaging said, come to Marlboro County. Marlboro County was smoke-land. A mythical, free-west, Kerouac-country America of meadows, mustangs, men, Mississippi, and of course, cigarettes. Generations warmed up to that manly, smoky-tale on the packaging. Decades later, a number of the original Marlboro models died from smoking related ailments.

Today, on the eve of the death of cigarette’s face of fake charm, we at ELIVIO take a look back at the incredulous, arbitrary artwork that adorned cigarette packaging since the 1800s to now… A change worth studying…

From the rosy images of past to the gory ones about to come, this has been a gradual change in the face of the smoke. Over the years, the charade of the beautiful faces has been replaced by the horror of the repulsive and diseased ones, just as in life, the careless nonchalance of the youthful smoker is gradually lost to the pain and suffering of the diseased patient.

So here are our pics of the lot. We are calling them the “CANCER CREATIVES”. ENJOY!!!

#1. The 1800s; cigarette packets featuring ‘happy’ child smokers. How happy would they have ended up as gown ups is, of course, a matter of doubt.