The year was 1995, fully five years after the release of Navy for women by the Noxell Corp., an absurd time to issue a masculine flanker for what was, even then, a lowbrow drugstore fragrance. CoverGirl, owned by Noxell, in turn owned by Proctor & Gamble, said fuck it, let's goooo, and did it anyway. Those of you who have been reading this blog since the beginning know that I've already reviewed Navy for Men, and you recall that it was the version made by Dana. The Dana formula and the Noxell formula are two completely different fragrances that bear almost no resemblance to each other. Thus I treat them as completely different fragrances, each worthy of their own review.
But they are in no way equally worthy fragrances. The Dana version isn't bad, per se. But it isn't particularly good, either. I consider it to be the sort of thing a college guy, a cash-strapped undergrad would wear, and hell, it would probably get him laid quite a bit if the rest of him measured up. I've known guys who had no sense of personal style in regard to clothes or fragrance, but they kept good hygiene and could pass for Paul Rudd after a few beers. The jeans-and-t-shirt guys. Dana's Navy is for them. It's a laundry-clean scent, brimming with sweet tangerine and synthetic mints and lavenders and white musks, and it manages to smell like Febreeze if Febreeze smelled good. Why anyone over the age of twenty-two would wear it is beyond me, but I guess a guy could do worse.
Noxell's original formula is a completely different story. This formula died sometime around 2003, a slow death, I might add, by formula drift that started when CoverGirl sold the rights to Dana sometime in the late nineties. Your window for enjoying the Noxell version was pretty brief, only a few years at best, and it was the sort of fragrance that few outside of the aforementioned demographic would have bothered to avail themselves of. Surviving Noxell Corp. bottles with the Hunt Valley, Maryland address are growing increasingly rare, though they do not yet command anything near unicorn prices. The back of the box and bottle should look like mine, with Noxell on both for deep vintage:
So, how is this one different? Put simply, it's leagues better. Leagues. Don't get me wrong, it's still a drugstore fragrance, but it smells absolutely gorgeous, even thirty years later. It's the smell of the boy's locker room in high school, freshman year. Dihydromyrcenol, up the wazoo. A drop of Calone 1951, but only one small micro-drop, adding New West levels of pink sweetness but with none of the lucidly piney textures overlaying it, except for that Monster-sized juniper berry note that explodes off the top and pervades the entire drydown with its evergreen, gin-like aromatic magic. If you need a straight-up juniper berry fragrance, you'll be hard-pressed to find one better than Navy for Men by Noxell.
The fragrance as a whole has a passing resemblance to things like Drakkar Noir (1982), Horizon by Guy Laroche (1993), and Polo Sport (1994), with Polo likely serving as CoverGirl's inspiration, given its release the year before. Yes, Navy is a nineties locker room all bottled up in blue, but it's also the smell of your neighbor's house in 1996 when you went over to play video games with their son. A few sprays of this stuff fills several rooms. It's deodorant-fresh and blatantly synthetic, yet it encapsulates everything Pierre Bourdon meant when he described creating "a new kind of freshness"—though he wasn't the nose behind Navy, and I have no clue who was. I also have no idea what the feminine version smells like, but I imagine it's worlds apart from the masculine one, given their five-year age gap. CoverGirl had a Ken doll type in mind with this flanker.
Of note is the fact that Navy for Men smells good, really good, and better than a number of super expensive niche fragrances that I reviewed this year and last. This reinforces the point I made in my previous article: Are niche fragrances a rip-off, especially if you have access to these classic scents that are still made well today? Vintage Navy could easily be bottled in a swanky, blinged-out bottle and marked up to $150 for an ounce, and I doubt anyone would suspect it came from a drugstore. They'd probably say, "Oh, this is that locker room scent from your childhood, except done right." Well, no. No, it isn't. It's literally that locker room scent from your childhood. And that's how far we've fallen since then.