I recently bought a bottle of "deep vintage" Old Spice cologne, a bottle with stopper #2 made between 1950 and 1955. To be clear, I consider any bottle with stopper #1 or #2 to be "deep vintage." My bottle is about 60% full (a light test reveals the level to be almost exactly where the taper of the buoy begins), and is in fair cosmetic shape - faded but legible graphics, a small dent on an otherwise pristine metal stopper cowl - yet it arrived with a problem. The kind of problem I only encounter with things as old as early 1950s Old Spice: the stopper top snapped off in transit, and the rest of it is lodged flush in the spout, completely blocking the removal of fluid.
This sounds like a major setback, but in reality it's no big deal. It delays the experience of wearing and reviewing the stuff, but it's merely a delay - I have other bottles I can decant the cologne into. This situation demands some "excavating" be done to access the cologne, which is sequestered by a seventy year-old chunk of broken polyethylene, so I made a plan. When my 1955-1963 bottle is empty, I'll use a small nail to tap the stopper down into the bottle, and then use a decanting pipette to transfer the cologne (now with a piece of plastic floating in it) into the available container. I'll then use what is left of the stopper to reseal the older empty bottle, and simply use it for display. Issue resolved.
This situation does have me reflecting on how vintage Old Spice is the only vintage fragrance that feels archeological in nature. The picture above is of an empty 1940s Hull Pottery bottle on eBay, and just take a look at it. Doesn't it look like something recovered from the wreck of the Titanic? It's a product of twentieth century America, and there are still plenty of people walking around today who were alive when it was made, yet it looks like it was recovered from the bottom of the ocean. Its glaze is cracked, there are oxidation marks everywhere, and its hand-painted graphics, likely stenciled on mere moments before the pottery was fired, are primitive in nature. It's Indiana Jones fare.
My bottle, made by the Wheaton Glass Company, is not nearly as rustic looking, but it bears a similar overall design. The base is embossed with the words Early American Old Spice, which hearkens back to the days when Shulton pitched this fragrance to women. Old Spice is America's only true wartime cologne, released a year before the start of World War II, and issued in smaller, simpler bottles to troops abroad. It survived the war, and the intervening eighty years, and is a testament to American masculinity. My bottle stirs echoes of that time, and all of its mythical archetypes, and when I shake it and hear liquid sloshing around, I wonder how a pedestrian drugstore cologne managed to survive. It's amazing to me that it wasn't used up and discarded decades ago.
It leaves me wondering what is possible in the quest for deep vintage Old Spice. Are there pristine Hull Pottery bottles out there? (When I say 'pristine,' I mean bottles that still contain original fluid.) How many might exist? Ten? Twenty? What fractional percentage of vintages precede the Vietnam War? Of that small number, how many zeros go before the decimal point for extant Korean War bottles, i.e. bottles like the one sitting on my desk as I write this? And of those, how many more zeros must be added to the decimal to accurately convey the number of surviving WWII bottles? And of those, how many are original Hull Pottery bottles with rust-free stopper #1? A full four-ounce bottle of Hull Pottery Old Spice is, without exaggeration, the Holy Grail of wetshaver deep vintages.