Boy Mints Girl

Works in Jan’s Market Makers series reflect on the role that branding, marketing, and social media have played in our lives.

In Boy Mints Girl, a US advertisement for the confection brand Life Savers presents an archetypal American teenager’s rite-of-passage: the school dance, with a confident suited boy offering mints to the girls seated in a row.

With all the American courting tradition on board – the girls’ white gloves, the boy’s white tuxedo jacket, indicating an event after Memorial Day in May (at which point in the States one switches from a black dinner jacket to a white one), the corsages of flowers on the girls, the girls seated and waiting to be picked – this piece offers a reminder of and reflection on all-but-lost courting rituals, and more generally, the role that traditional courting and family-building has played in contemporary society; a long way from today’s ‘quick-change’ dating-app norms.