I'm glad I could get to this cologne, because I've been wanting to write about it for a few weeks. I used a long wood nail to push the fragment of stopper all the way into the bottle, and rescued the goods. I finally freed the liquid from my Korean War-era bottle, and decanted it into my 1955-1963 bottle with pipettes I found at Michaels. The whole thing took ten minutes to accomplish, from start to finish.
I was grateful that the contents were genuine, and not generic label Old Spice and/or colored water. My fear upon receiving the eBay purchase was that the seller had scammed me by breaking the stopper in its neck to discourage any attempt to recover its counterfeit contents. Fortunately this was not the case, and I'm happy to report that the cologne is real, and it's shockingly fresh. This bottle was barely used, and smells newer than the "newer" vintage formula I just finished. Pretty astonishing.
Luca Turin once commented that Opium by YSL smelled "green" to him, like "jade" or something (I'm too lazy to get up and look at the review in The Guide). I remember reading this and thinking it was interesting because I rarely associate the color green with oriental fragrances. My thoughts always sway to amber, that abstract golden color of resins and precious woods. The late Dan Mickers seemed to connect with Turin's color-coding when he remarked that Old Spice's current P&G formula has a green "pine needle" note, which seemed strange when I heard him say it, but makes sense now that I'm smelling this seventy year-old version. It's not pine needles. It's resins blended with nitromusks, and P&G's attempt to replicate this effect with cheaper chems translates to a sharp and borderline terpenic effect.
But it gets weirder. Shulton apparently had two formulas in the fifties. From 1956 onward, the nitromusks were amped up, along with the vanilla and powder. Pre-1956? The fresh citrus sparkle and sweeter spiced carnation midsection of P&G's current formula, and the dusky eugenol-fueled transition to a subtle musky powder base are all revealed to have been exactly the same, using slightly better synthetics. This early fifties formula is so similar in overall effect to the current American "Classic" formula that if I hadn't seen the orange color of the juice, I'd wonder. I decanted some into an atomizer (also Michaels) and let it "breathe," like whiskey in a snifter, and the biggest giveaway that this is truly deep vintage is the base. I can smell the nitromusk notes, and there's this interesting woody-resinous element that weaves through the powder, although everything smells lighter and more balanced than the late fifties/early sixties formula.
What I'm trying to say is that the formula from 1950 to 1955 smells very similar to P&G's current formula. How is this possible? I have a theory. First, let me address the differences. The citrus in vintage is muted. I attribute this to the typical time-erosion effect on top notes, which happens to nearly all citrus tops within ten years. Mind you, the citrus note in current OS isn't exactly in your face. This isn't a citrus cologne, it's an oriental, and the notes are sweet (orange/mandarin) and brief. In the current stuff you can sense a hint of orange citrus hanging in the periphery of the other notes during the drydown, the mark of well-blended synthetics. The same is true for vintage, although again it's to a lesser degree.
Another difference is the sweetness and "natural" feel of vintage vs. current. This old blend is definitely sweeter, with a bit of cinnamon-sugar fizz and sweeter musk in the drydown. Contrary to sentiments online, P&G's blend isn't particularly sweet at any stage. It's overtly "masculine," with emphasis on burly clove and peppery carnation, and with a dusky dryness that bullhorns to wearers that flowers and sweets are for little girls. While I appreciate that aspect of the new stuff, the more affable saccharine element in vintage is easy to like and wears very nicely. With wet shaving in mind, it's not hard to see why Old Spice was popular in the forties into the fifties. Women would appreciate this on their husbands' faces.
One of the biggest differences is in which notes are employed, and how they shape the overall scent profile. Let's talk about what kind of oriental P&G's formula is. When Proctor & Gamble bought the brand, they streamlined the formula into an inoffensive spiced carnation powder. You had the bright pop of cinnamon and clove, the vaguely rosy-spicy carnation element, a hint of vanilla, and a big dusting of talc powder in the base, which is what men were left with ninety minutes after application. Their 2000s reformulation was a reimagining of that carnation midsection, with carnation's eugenol properties accentuated and the powder infused with a bit of citrus freshness. But this early fifties vintage employs a clear note of allspice, which is the dried and crushed berries of the Pimenta dioica plant.
Allspice is a wonderful note to employ in an oriental composition because it encompasses analog smells for four other spices (hence its inclusive name): cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, and clove. You can tell the difference between allspice and an ordinary melange of those four notes by the quietly sweet woodiness that accompanies it. With straightforward spice notes, you get a spice rack. With the singular allspice note, you get the same rack but with the feeling that it's "fused" by that distinct sweetness. I get this in spades in this vintage, and it's a dimensional, lucid note.
My theory on how the old and new formulas smell so alike is simply that P&G drew from this formula to make their own. It makes sense when you think about it; nitromusks were a bit pricy and they've been banned for forty years, and rich vanilla notes were deemed feminine at some point in the late seventies. The heads at Proctor & Gamble would have been reluctant to use the formula from 1956 to 1970 because that would require some heavy synthesis of nitromusks, and an uncomfortable degree of vanilla in a 2000s men's fragrance. So they opted instead to mimic the less musk-heavy, less vanillic pre-1956 formula. It was probably easier, significantly cheaper, and more in line with Old Spice than American Cyanamid's formulas were.
I haven't smelled Creed's original Viking, but I've read endless articles about how people suspect it was inspired by Old Spice. This is likely the case; Olivier
is quoted in an interview in 2013 as stating that midcentury colognes like Old Spice and Agua Brava are very good fragrances. Creed is known to take familiar fragrance ideas and reinterpret them in its own house style (usually padded with small quantities of natural essences on the front end and a shave of real ambergris on the back end). If we referred solely to the current P&G formula, I'd have difficulty seeing how Creed could have worked it, but wearing this deep vintage formula gives me a clearer idea of how rich and comparatively luxurious Old Spice was. There are articles out there that suggest real ambergris was used in Shulton's earlier formulas, and I swear I get a tickle of it in the heart of this stuff. Heck, it's not far-fetched. One lump of ambergris, used correctly, could last a brand like Shulton thirty years if used simply for enhancing effect.
My phrase "slightly better synthetics" refers to the fact that today's synthetics are fortified by years of R&D, but they're usually 100% chemical, with no direct connection to naturals other than whatever molecular synthesis was developed to make them in a lab. Yesterday's synthetics had much of the same kind of R&D, but the idea was to use them to fill out whatever naturally-derived chemicals were also in the mix. These were materials that had facets to them, things like nitromusks and fruity esters. You could tease out floral and spicy elements when integrating them correctly, and the animalic-woody element of nitromusks adds complexity to the overall feel of what would otherwise be a fairly simple structure. Ambergris added in a tiny amount would create a dimensionality of weirdly salty-sweet earthiness in the periphery, and the fact that this exists in this formula has me suspecting it was used throughout the forties as well. It smells fine-tuned.
The allspice note is the biggest draw, however. This leads me to address one of the things I've been reading through the years about Old Spice. There is no "pimento pepper" note in this composition. It's not a "hot pepper" or "red pepper" element. It's not "pimento." It's pimenta. It's allspice.
Another thing that irks me is that there are people out there who insist on saying that Old Spice is just a bay rum by another name. This is a slow-drip problem. Every few months (and years) you get someone who calls Old Spice "bay rum" like established fact.
It isn't. Old Spice is not, and has never been a bay rum. Examples of this offense culled from basenotes read as follows:
"Grottola" in 2010:
"The best take on bay rum ever - my favorite bay rum. Well, that's what it is!"
"bokaba" in 2008:
"The new version by Proctor and Gamble is garbage and nothing more than an overly synthetic bay rum."
"tvlampboy" in 2006:
"Bay rum with little to no lasting power. Big whoop. Burt's bees bay rum and Royall bay rum are SO much better."
There are a few other instances on basenotes and Badger&Blade, but I won't bother to post them here. Old Spice is an oriental fragrance from top to bottom, with no bay oil, no bay note, no rum note, and no bay rum accord at any stage of its development. Many bay rums employ a distinct clove note, and this is the only note OS shares with any them. That's certainly not enough to call it bay rum. How and why people insist on claiming it's a bay rum is beyond me, and I wish they would stop.
The last thing I want to mention concerns the incorrect notion that Shulton produced Old Spice until 1990, when Proctor & Gamble finally bought the brand. People gloss over the fact that American Cyanamid bought Shulton in December of 1970, and owned the brand for twenty years prior to selling it to P&G. From 1970 onward, Old Spice wasn't really being made by Shulton. This is evidenced by the fact that 1970s Old Spice is markedly different from the versions that preceded it.
If you really focus in on how that formula develops, there's a noticeably musky aspect of the base that amps up the powdery vanilla notes. The sweetness of the spicy top is also amplified, with that sweetness getting slightly animalic in the base, an evolution that makes sense given the musky profile. Then in the 1980s that musky quality receded and was replaced with a fizzier cinnamon-spice quality that to my memory wasn't especially tenacious. This eighties version seemed to cross over into the nineties, growing gradually weaker and less obviously powdery with each passing year.
When American Cyanamid took over they offered Shulton employees and shareholders $0.96 for every $1 of Shulton stock owned. This helped retain Shulton staff and keep the train running on time. But it's worth noting that this change of share value signifies an indisputable change of hands, with the Shulton brass officially stepping away from the main controls. Yes, subsequent generations of OS bottles bore the "Shulton, Inc." mark on them, but much as Colgate-Palmolive puts "By Mennen" on bottles of Skin Bracer, this was AC's way of keeping brand recognition alive. After all, "American Cyanamid" doesn't have the same ring to it.
It should also be noted that American Cyanamid operated under slightly different rules that were written in a slightly different world. Back in the 1970s there was value associated with maintaining brand recognition in as many ways as possible. Back then people weren't satisfied with keeping the glass bottle with the logo and typeface on it. They wanted to keep the maker's mark as well. Proctor & Gamble's haste in putting their name on the bottles (and completely discarding Shulton's) was a sign of the times; by 1990 companies as large as P&G wanted consumers to identify old classics with their portfolio alone, and routinely made the cynical calculation that buyers wouldn't care.
Sadly, they were correct. Today, thirty-two years after the final sale, P&G's products and marketing have all but erased the Shulton legacy. I read all the time about how P&G "saved" Old Spice, and to a certain extent it's all true. But look how they did it. This wasn't a repositioning of the brand in an ever-expanding men's grooming market. This was the total annihilation of the modest small-brand dignity which Shulton had maintained, and which American Cyanamid had preserved. Things called "Bearglove" and "Swagger" aren't manly or tasteful, but hey, teenagers will buy them! Who cares if forty year-olds are turned off? We still make the "Classic" for them!
