“Does she…or doesn’t she?” became one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time. When Polykoff landed the account (mainly because she was the only female copywriter at Foote, Cone & Belding) hair dye sales amounted to $25 million per year. Within a decade of her game-changing ad, they had risen to $200 million — and Clairol owned half the market share.

The ad’s popularity wasn’t in its latent sexuality, were it ever intended in the first place. Rather, Clairol anticipated a pivot from old-fashioned beauty norms, which were steeped in charade. Hair dye was no longer shameful, a ruse reserved for “lower class” or “fast” women. It became any woman’s choice.

Within two years, half the women in the U.S. were using hair colorings. It “unleashed American women to choose the color of their hair,” wrote The New York Times in Polykoff’s 1998 obituary. Eventually Polykoff’s work would earn her a place in the Advertising Hall of Fame and an executive title at FC&B.

Polykoff was FC&B’s highest paid employee before leaving to form her own agency in 1973.

Polykoff is considered the main inspiration behind Mad Men’s Peggy Olson, an adamant defender of equal rights. But Polykoff adhered to more bygone principles. Despite her great work, Polykoff would not accept a pay raise for many years. She considered it insulting to make more than her husband, and demanded FC&B to keep her salary at $25,000. In the decade following his death in 1961, however, the company doubled her salary twice.

Polykoff would invent other famous beauty slogans, such as “Do blondes really have more fun?” and “If I’ve only got one life to live, let me live it as a blonde.” Not exactly a feminist approach, but she defended her worldview, often insisting she was “a girl first and an advertising woman second.”

In 1973, Polykoff left FC&B, where she was the agency’s highest paid employee, to start her own firm. She died in 1988.

Nowadays more than 75% of women color their hair, according to a study by Clairol.