Smooth SAILING
The scent of dadness turns 80 this year
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 (shapes over the years included a compass rose and a scrimshaw-decorated whale tooth), always seemed to register at least a generation older than its target demographic.
And for the first four decades (we’ll get to the second four decades in a bit), it was pretty smooth sailing for the ship-emblazoned bottles of aftershave, cologne and shaving soap. To key into the colonial/ nautical brand aesthetic, the earliest packaging featured a sailing vessel called the Grand Turk, with other ships joining the fleet starting in the 1940s. 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, in turn, would say anchors aweigh in 1990, the year it sold the brand to consumer-goods behemoth Procter & Gamble.
This chain of ownership and which colonial-era sailing ship appears on what bottle won’t matter much to the casual consumer of Old Spice products. But, for eBay bargain hunters, hard-core collectors and the occasional 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 (stick deodorants, mostly), 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. (On a side note, who really needs to stockpile that much dental floss?)
The bottle has occupied a place of honor in my own medicine cabinet ever since I brought it home some 3½ years ago. It sits next to an Old Spice shaving mug of the same milky white glass, a vintage double-edge Gillette safety razor and a badgerhair shaving brush. The other three items had also been my Dad’s but were gifts I had given him over the years; their back stories were anything but mysterious. I just sort of saw the cologne bottle there every morning 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 wallet-sized photo of him my brother tucked into the sun visor of his pickup truck. In full disclosure, I hadn’t spent a whole lot of time thinking much about the bottle.
That is until Old Spice released an 80th-anniversary limited-edition capsule collection a few weeks back. For most of the last four decades (I told you we’d get here, didn’t I?), 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, towelclad Isaiah Mustafa, who helped the brand’s 2010 “Smell like a man, man” campaign go viral.