The other day at work a young woman of twenty-two casually mentioned that "Men always smell like deodorant, their cologne all smells kinda the same." I probably wouldn't have heard her say it, if she weren't a classic brunette with nerves of steel (in my line of work, having steady nerves is a big plus). So beauty and strength were talking here. I tend to key into her thoughts, whenever she randomly vocalizes them. This particular thought was an old standby though, something I've heard a few times before from women. One of my exes said the same thing to me when she smelled Green Irish Tweed wafting off my collar. She wrinkled her nose a little and looked bored as she said it: "Why do men always smell like sport deodorant?" I know, I know, but trust me, it's one of many reasons why I broke up with her.
Do we smell like deodorant all the time? Are the world's men little more than blue-jeaned sticks of underarm protection? Where there's smoke there's fire, and in this case there's some truth to the charge, although I must point out that many men consciously avoid dabbing "The Water Of Joe." You girls out there can blame Paco Rabanne and Drakkar Noir for starting it, and you can thank Lauder's New West, Davidoff's Cool Water, and Quintessence's Aspen for changing the entire scent dichotomy around. It used to be that fragrances had complementary deodorants, but once the truly contemporary stuff hit shelves in the late eighties, the deodorants and their namesakes were indistinguishable from each other. It was novel and refreshing for a few years, and then the nineties made it cliche. At this point it's become a question that women ask, somewhat rhetorically: why?
My guess is that it's a strange social evolution, something that took a few hundred years to develop, based on female responses to male grooming practices. For centuries men have tried their hand at alluring women with their personalities and their personas. Ladies, you know it all too well - our smiles and pick-up lines are our personalities, and our hygiene, odors, and fashion senses are our personas. Based on your responses across generations of acceptance and rejection, the cards have fallen into place, and the last hand has been dealt. Guess what? Somehow you steered us directly into smelling "fresh" and "clean" and amazingly nondescript. If you didn't like us this way, we would smell like bacon and chewing tobacco instead. That brings me to Cool Water Into The Ocean for men, a beautiful little reboot of the original CW, with a salinated tomato leaf and basil top note, the original lavender/apple heart, and closing credits of minty herbs and musk. Ain't life grand?