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| It's all good now. |
It's true: my midcentury drugstore bottle of Lilac Vegetal bit the dust. However, I also stumbled upon a situation on eBay that allowed me to purchase a pristine vintage barbershop replacement bottle for under fifty bucks at auction, and without a single opposing bid. I think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity.
To recap, my original vintage bottle was perched precariously on a bathroom shelf, and the inevitable happened. I don't blame anyone but myself. I accepted that shelf location without argument, knowing that it was likely a terrible place for something so rare, and then had to live with the consequences of my neglect. To be sure, I should never have let it leave my house. Some things are better left in one place. That's history now, and what transpired afterward is fascinating because it's also something I'll never see again.
My first thought upon hearing that my original bottle had been smashed was, "Okay, it's just a glass bottle of something; stuff like that happens." My second thought, kind of a delayed reaction, was "Wait, that's not just any glass bottle. How the hell am I going to replace it?" It wasn't all that difficult, but only because fate smiled upon me. As soon as clean-up was complete, I hopped on eBay and typed in Vintage Pinaud.
The initial results were pretty abysmal. There were several twelve ounce bottles in varying stages of decay, most of them looking pretty rough with missing caps, worn-out labels, and filthy insides. But then I scrolled down to two back-to-back auction listings for what appeared to be the exact same late seventies barbershop bottle. I can't be sure of the exact date, but judging from the green cap and label style, it appears to be roughly from the era when the movie "The Jerk" came out.
Unlike my previous bottle, which looked to be a Walgreens item from the early 1960s, this one was "for professional use only," denoting its class as an official wholesale barbershop product. I happen to like this style, still in use, still with the same label design, except back then the bottle was a bit larger, heftier, and solid glass. It turns out the seventies formula for the product was also significantly different from the current stuff, and smells almost exactly like my other vintage, with perhaps just a little more of a raw-green "vegetal" edge, which nudges it only slightly closer to how the current stuff smells.
So I'm on eBay, and I see this bottle with a starting price of $45. Then I see an identical post next to it for what looks like the same bottle, price, and seller. I message the seller and ask him if he has two identical bottles, or if he just posted the same item twice. He tells me he has two bottles, but doesn't send a verification photo. I ask him for one, and he sends me this, after which I spend five minutes rubbing my eyes in disbelief:
I take a look, and my mind is blown. I've never seen two identical barbershop vintages of The Veg with zero differences and in pristine condition. The only slight difference I could spot was that the liquid on the left was a little darker than the one on the right (which is the one I got). I apologized for doubting him. He told me, "No problem." This was clearly going to be a unique buying opportunity.
The facts were clear: I had to maneuver for one of these bottles with no competition from anyone else, and this would probably happen because there were two identical bottles at the same price. I immediately posted my max bid at $200, with eight days until the auction ended. A few days later, I upped my bid to $300. I didn't touch the other bottle. I sat back and waited. Unless the seller reneged on the auction sale, I knew the bottle was mine, and I didn't even have to think about it.
The seller made one crucial error: he posted photos of the same exact bottle in both listings. Had he posted the genuine bottle, buyers would have spotted the very minor differences between them, particularly the little smudge on the glass of the bottle on the right, and they would have known that the seller was legit (i.e., not scammy). But with two postings of the same bottle, and one of them requiring a max bid higher than $300, the whole thing suddenly looked super sketchy. Few would want to venture into that void.
There was also the fact that if other buyers messaged the seller, they would get the same photo that he sent me. They would then figure that if eBay wants a max bid of over three hundred for one bottle when the other one hasn't been bid on at all, the one with no bids is their best shot. The path of least resistance was bottle #2. The auction closed on day eight. I was the only bidder on the first bottle, and I won the auction at $45. (The second bottle sold for the same amount the next day.)
It's hard to overstate how beautiful this bottle is. It doesn't have the back label of the drugstore bottle, with its funny and whimsical marketing copy, but it was kept in clean condition, out of sunlight, and smells fresh. The red Pinaud stamp that says "A Basket of Flowers" is as clear as day (and quite large), the embossing of "Pinaud, Paris, New York, London" is not worn down on the back, and most importantly the "Lilas de France" slogan is crystal clear in brightly silkscreened color on the front. Absolutely magnificent. The bottle arrived with about ten ounces in it, and although it was previously opened and used, it was not tampered with, and smells perfect.
Lilac Vegetal was released in 1878 in New York City, according to David Woolf, executive vice president of American International Industries, which manufactured the Pinaud line in the 1990s. The fragrance was sold to barbershops and athletic clubs throughout the twentieth century, and survives today. I find it funny to think of myself retiring into a sedate life of golfing and country club brunches, only to find this big glass bottle of Lilac Vegetal by the sink in the men's lavatory. It appears as one of several common masculine colognes lined up by the mirror in the bathroom of the fancy restaurant that Ferris Bueller crashes in the hit John Hughes movie. Vintage smells different from the current stuff - powdery, soft, a little sweet - and I think every wetshaver owes it to himself to find a bottle.
I want to close on this note: Pinaud, unlike every other fragrance brand out there, is special. It changes at a snail's pace. Up until only a few years ago, Clubman aftershave was still being made with real oakmoss. The other day I picked up a bottle from CVS and noticed it no longer contained oakmoss. It no longer contains any moss, not even treemoss. I'll be reviewing the new "moss-less" formula soon. It took Pinaud an extra twenty years to bend to IFRA regs on that. While most brands were stripping moss out of their formulas in the 2000s, Pinaud kept it in. Clubman Musk still has it, as far as I know, but then again I bought my bottle several years ago.
My point is, Pinaud is the last of the Mohicans. Even with IFRA compliance, they still make a nineteenth century Lilac Water, and from how it smells, it seems like they reverted the formula back to something from that time period. They still make Eau de Quinine. Think about that. In 2024, there's a company that sells a product that smells like a colonial quinine tonic. They even still make Eau de Portugal. Pinaud is probably of greater value than any other brand I own. If you're reading this, you have one direction. Get a Pinaud and value it highly, because it is a national treasure.