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| This used to suck. |
About a year ago, Helen of Troy, Limited quietly sold Brut to High Ridge Brands (Tengram Capital Partners), and nobody noticed. I had no idea until I spotted a Brut product that I'll be reviewing soon in a local Walmart. I noticed that it was a "new" product, distinct from any Brut I'd seen before, with different labelling, coloring, and pricing. This piqued my interest. After several years, time to revisit Brut.
I stopped at a Grocery Store and picked up a bottle of the "Splash-On" lotion, which so far is the only concentration of the non-aftershave HRB Brut that I've seen. Helen of Troy purchased the license for manufacture of Brut in North America on September 2nd, 2003, which marks about nineteen years of ownership, and I have to say, things didn't end up so well. From 2003 to 2012, Brut was pretty good. I have a bottle of cologne (not "Splash On") from that era, and it's brusquely aromatic and enjoyable. The "Splash On" version wasn't all that amazing, however. I'd follow the directions and splash it on, and it would smell like Brut for twenty seconds and promptly vanish without a trace. For those seeking a fuller and rounder experience, Brut "Classic" was available in the sixties glass bottle style with the silver chain. It boasted extra aromatics and an expansive coumarinic heart accord that was a step up from the drugstore packaging.
Then, sometime between 2013 and 2017, Helen of Troy decided to reformulate Brut and repackage it with a fugly shield logo, and things got much suckier. The cologne had lost its aromatic edge and become flatter, sweeter, and cheaper in overall feel. The "Splash On" wasn't worth a squirt of piss, and I gave up on Brut. They discontinued Brut "Classic," and replaced it with Brut "Special Reserve," which was similar, but had lost the aromatic edge of its predecessor, and had a more muted coumarinic drydown. In retrospect, I probably should have bought a few bottles of Brut Black, which was a light and somewhat dull fougère, redeemed by an intense anise-licorice note. But regular old Brut had finally been cheapened to the point where it was no longer worth wearing.
That final Helen of Troy formula must have been the tipping point for the company, and they divested their holdings of Brut in 2022. High Ridge Brands could have done the easy thing, and just kept the fragrance formula the same, and nobody would have been the wiser. It's exceedingly rare in today's world for a company to buy a product and improve it. Yet that's exactly what HRB did, in a surprise twist, by dialing the Brut formula back to . . . wait for it . . . 2000. You read that correctly: they have revived not the early Helen of Troy version, but the late Unilever version, the one I would sneak sniffs of in CVS as a teenager. (At the time, I thought Brut smelled bizarrely nasty.) If you doubt me, go ahead and get a new HRB bottle and smell for yourself. Be careful to check the label on the back for HRB's markings, as there are still many bottles of Helen of Troy's version lingering on shelves.
I fully expected the "Splash-On" formula to be just as crappy as it's always been, but when I copped a sniff at the store, my eyebrows went up. Gone were the flat vanilla and musk notes, and in their place were crisp aromatics and even a hint of a faux nitromusk, which Unilever had been using for many years. The potency of the formula is unreal, as it literally swings from the spout and punches me in the nostrils. But would it actually perform? I took it home, splashed it on, and was immersed in a version of Brut that I haven't smelled in over twenty years. And yeah, it faded within five minutes, but not entirely! I ran some errands, to the bank, to a few stores, and ninety minutes after application a breeze caught my collar and wafted a gentle whiff of lavender to my nose. This formula actually endures, even as a "Splash On," the stuff that isn't supposed to linger.
I'm not going to sit here and write that HRB has taken Brut back to the eighties and nineties, because they haven't. But they've taken it back to a time just prior to Helen of Troy, or at least to the H.O.T. formula from the early to mid 2000s. Brut ages in the bottle and gets burlier and muskier over time, so it's difficult to compare deep vintages to current stuff (scary that stuff from 2000 to 2005 is "deep vintage"), but if you could time travel back to 2000 and get your nose on a fresh bottle, it would smell a lot like the brand new 2023 bottle in my shave den. Keep up the good wok, HRB! You are on track to being the company that saves Brut, and brings a classic back to the mainstream.