‘Vicco turmeric, nahi cosmetic, Vicco…’ and you just sang the rest of the lyrics. Sung by playback singer Preeti Sagar and looped into national memory through the 1980s, the jingle has outlasted the television sets it first played on, the single channel that carried it, and several generations of marketers who tried to write something as sticky. It still runs in cinema halls today, more folk song than film commercial, and it remains the loudest proof point in a quieter, stubborn story about what it takes for an Ayurvedic brand to stay relevant for seven decades.
That story starts in 1952, in a small godown in Mumbai's Parel, where Keshav Vishnu Pendharkar registered the Vishnu Industrial Chemical Company and set about turning ancient Ayurvedic texts into a tooth-cleaning powder. There was no distribution network to speak of—Pendharkar and his sons carried the product door to door themselves. Commercial production began in 1955 out of a factory with an annual turnover of just ₹10,000, a figure the company still likes to put beside its present-day scale, only to underline the distance travelled.
The product that made Vicco a household name came a couple of decades later, when the company moved into skincare with a turmeric-and-sandalwood cream at a time when the Indian market was ruled by imported ‘snow’ creams. Turmeric's place in wedding rituals gave the cream instant cultural fluency, but it also came with a very literal trust problem: buyers feared it would stain their skin yellow. Vicco's answer was almost absurdly hands-on—salespersons reportedly carried mirrors into shops so retailers could watch the cream disappear into their own skin before they'd agree to stock it.
The bigger battle, though, was with the government, and it is the one that actually produced the jingle. In 1978, India's Central Excise Authorities ruled that Vicco Vajradanti and Vicco Turmeric Cream could not be classified as Ayurvedic medicine and would have to be taxed as cosmetics instead. Vicco disagreed and fought the ruling through three levels of the judiciary, winning each time. It was during that fight—a company insisting, in a courtroom, that its cream was medicine and not make-up — that ‘Vicco turmeric, nahi cosmetic’ was written, turning a tax argument into a tune a country would continue to hum through the decades.
By 1984, Vicco had taken that conviction to television, sponsoring Doordarshan's ‘Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi’ with a 77-second commercial that showed a young Sangeeta Bijlani applying turmeric cream as part of a pre-wedding haldi ritual. With Doordarshan as the country's only channel, the campaign reached practically every television-owning household in India—the company's own archives credit an earlier version of the ad, fronted by Mrinal Kulkarni, to 1980. Faces changed with each decade; the tune never did.
The infrastructure caught up through the '80s and '90s: a Nagpur factory in 1982 to serve both domestic and export demand, a 1994 shipment that made Vicco the first Indian company to export to Iceland, and a Goa plant in 1996 that the American Concrete Institute would later name among the country's most outstanding structures. Between 2000 and 2017, the portfolio widened into moisturisers, face washes, shaving creams and the pain-relief balm Vicco Narayani, and the government conferred Export House status on a company by then selling into 45 countries. Trade research tracked the payoff: Vicco climbed from 28th to 17th on the Brand Trust Report's most-trusted-brands list between 2012 and 2014.
The harder problem, by the late 2010s, was age—not the brand's, but its buyers'. Vicco had decades of loyal, ageing households and a visible gap among millennials who'd grown up on international skincare, not haldi creams. The company met it with a 2019 ‘Trusted Ayurveda’ campaign, a Vajradanti repack, and actor Alia Bhatt signed on as the toothpaste's face to pull a younger cohort into a daily habit their parents already boasted. The same year, Vicco brought on cricketer Sourav Ganguly, drawing a deliberate parallel between his role rebuilding Team India and the brand's own long rebuild.
That rebuild is still visibly underway. Many publications have counted Vicco among India's iconic brands in 2023, and in 2024—past the 70-year mark—the company unveiled new packaging for the original Turmeric Cream alongside a Kolkata TVC launch fronted by Raveena Tandon, keeping the formula's ‘natural goodness’ intact while giving the pack its first real refresh in years.
Vicco remains, pointedly, a family business—now under third-generation chairman Sanjeev Pendharkar—running factories in Dombivli, Nagpur and Goa, with revenues that trade estimates have placed in the region of ₹500 crore. Its shelf space still leans heavily on kirana stores rather than modern trade, even as a Shopify-run D2C site quietly builds a second front. PETA's Compassionate Business Award and BBC Knowledge's ‘Cult Brand’ citation, among its 2016 list of the country's Greatest Marketing Influencers, are both markers of the same thing: a brand that inspires attachment disproportionate to its ad spend.
That's the harder trick in 2026, with Dabur, Himalaya, Patanjali and Emami's Zandu all crowding the same ‘natural’ shelf Vicco once had to itself, and a fresh wave of D2C ayurvedic labels courting the exact millennial buyer Vicco spent the year, 2019 chasing. Vicco's answer has largely stayed the same as it was in 1978—no outspending the market, but out-trusting it. Seventy-plus years, four ad campaigns and one tax tribunal later, turmeric still isn't cosmetic.
