ANNIVERSARY
Play-Doh: Open-ended fun
More than 2 billion cans of Play-Doh have sold since it first hit shelves at Woodward and Lothrop Department Store in Washington, D.C., in 1956. Toy company Hasbro estimates that if you were to put all that compound through a Fun Factory play set, you would extrude a snake that could wrap around the earth 300 times.
The world’s most popular modeling clay has an unexpected history, beginning life as a cleaning compound for soot-stained walls. The company hit the skids, hard, at least twice— in the 1920s and again in the 1940s—until an imaginative nursery school teacher convinced the compound maker, her brother-in-law, to think of his product in a whole new way.
And soon there was no stopping Play-Doh. Once it caught on in the late 1950s and early 1960s, demand was so high, Play-Doh was back-ordered for 16 months.
In the years since, all kinds of fun facts have accumulated about Play-Doh, but the oddest may be this: On the toy’s 50th anniversary, Demeter Fragrance created Play-Doh perfume.
Then again, perhaps it isn’t so odd, after all. Anyone who grew up handling the clay recalls its distinctive aroma, which Hasbro described in a 2017 trademark filing as “the combination of a sweet, slightly musky, vanilla-like fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, and the natural smell of a salted, wheat-based dough.”
Or, as some might prefer to call it, the scent of childhood.