Old Spice bottle shines light on my departed dad
Old Spice, the de facto scent profile of American dadness, turns 80 this year, which makes it, well, old.
This doesn’t come as too much of a surprise since the men’s grooming brand, with its memorable nauticalthemed advertising campaigns, buoy-shaped fragrance bottles and assorted soaps-on-a-rope, always seemed to register at least a generation older than its target demographic.
Shulton, the company that launched the brand as a women’s fragrance in 1937 before tweaking it and renaming it Old Spice for Men the following year, would eventually be absorbed by American Cyanamid in 1970, which would say anchors aweigh in 1990, the year it sold the brand to consumergoods behemoth Procter & Gamble.
This chain of owners and which colonial-era sailing ship appears on what bottle won’t matter much to the casual consumer of Old Spice products. But, for bargain hunters, hardcore collectors and the inheritor of a vintage, buoy-shaped, bone-white cologne bottle, they’re crucial clues.
It’s in this last category that I find myself, having taken possession of my father’s Old Spice cologne bottle after he passed away in 2014. My mother and I decided I should be custodian of this tangible olfactory memory partly because I had become a second-generation Old Spice customer on his account and partly because, as we were cleaning out the bathroom medicine cabinet of his belongings, she gave the bottle a good shake and found it to be at least half full.
The bottle sits next to an Old Spice shaving mug of the same milky white glass, a vintage double-edge Gillette safety razor and a badger-hair shaving brush. I just sort of saw the cologne bottle there every morn- ing out of the corner of my eye, a daily reminder of him, what my mom calls “a tug at the heart strings,” not unlike the photo of him my brother tucked into the sun visor of his pickup truck.
Old Spice released an 80thanniversary limited-edition capsule collection a few weeks back.
For most of the last four decades the brand has all but put the crusty colonial mariner vibe in dry dock as it tried to reclaim market dominance in the era of brands such as Axe body spray. The ships of yore have morphed into sleek yachts. Products like body wash bear names such as Wolfthorn (described as “the sort of sophisticated wolf who wears a suit that has a suave, sweet orange scent”) and the sea captain in TV spots has ceded command to the likes of smooth-talking, towel-clad Isaiah Mustafa.
That’s why the retro look of the capsule, available only during 2018 and selling exclusively through Walmart, was so surprising. An homage to the brand’s early packaging. And the original, distinctively shaped bottle even gets a cameo as a buoy.
It bobs in the sea surrounded by sharks (on the deodorant), is held aloft in the tentacles of a kraken (on the antiperspirant) and splashes down with a pair of parachutes (on the body wash). Clearly I wasn’t the only one for whom the bottle resonated.
This prompted me to take a longer look at the memento in my medicine cabinet. According to a Procter & Gamble archivist who pored over old catalogues and Old Spice advertisements on my behalf, the bottle was made between 1956 and 1967, based on the bottle design and stopper style. At 51 to 62 years old, this wasn’t so much a bottle as a time capsule of my Dad’s entire grooming life.
To put this in perspective, at its oldest, this bottle of cologne would have come into Douglas Allan Tschorn’s life when he was just 21 years old.
He could have come into its possession barely two years after I was born. He may well have used some of its citrus/ vanilla/carnation-scented contents the day he married my mom in 1962. And, now that I know the timeline, I can’t help but imagine that he splashed a few drops onto his smiling face that day in 1965 when my parents brought my newborn self home from the maternity ward of Rhode Island’s Woonsocket Hospital.
This Father’s Day will be the fourth since my shopkeeper dad shuffled off to the great country store in the sky.
Somehow as it rolls around this year, I find the memories of my father have somehow grown even stronger, buoyed by a vintage — and still half-full — bottle of Old Spice cologne.
At 51 to 62 years old, this wasn’t so much a bottle as a time capsule of my Dad’s entire grooming life