Williams Mug Soap (Combe Inc.)

If we must continue to live under pandemic conditions, I am officially switching from shaving with pedestrian "canned goo," like Barbasol and Gillette, to a synthetic brush and shave soap. One can offset life's big impositions by embracing its small luxuries. There is no better way to do that than by dropping a puck of Williams shave soap into a shave mug and whipping up a stiff lather. 

Except, as gentlemen on B&B point out, lathering is tricky with Williams. Considered to be one of the cheapest standard no-frills soaps a bloke can buy, Williams is notorious for being difficult to whip, even with rigorous brushwork. To succeed you must (a) Use soft water, and (b) "Bloom" the puck before attempting use. I do the following: buy Poland Spring water, and boil some in a kettle. Then I pour it over the puck and wait about twenty minutes. By that point it has absorbed all the water and created a layer of solid fattiness over it, which then needs only a bit of brushwork to resurrect. 

It takes serious motion in my Fendrihan mug to get something like the consistency of whipped cream, but it gets there. I can brush it on my face, and it holds long enough for my razor to do its magic. I have oily skin, so the drying nature of Williams is a plus for me (and a significant minus for anyone with naturally dry skin). The scent? It is identical to the original Ivory bar soap, the one which famously floats. This makes sense, as Williams is the creator of Ivory soap.

At a buck per puck, this is a true bargain. There are pricier soaps that I'm sure I'll try, but for a guy like me who just wants a quick scratch, Williams is fine, and for the price it's impossible to beat. 

Aqua Velva Ice Sport (Combe Inc.)

Aqua Velva Ice Sport. The aftershave that says, "Welcome to the nineties!" 1994, to be exact. Which, if memory serves me, is the year it was released, and two years before my freshman year of private Catholic high school (short skirts, short skirts, short skirts, short skirts, short skirts). Either way, it's been two decades since I smelled it. I was a teenager, secretly lusting after Natalie Merchant, and obsessed with science fiction novels and everything eighties. 

One thing I do remember with utmost clarity is smelling Ice Sport for the first time at the drugstore. Unlike the original, it was in plastic - it always came in 3.5 oz plastic squeeze bottles. I remember thinking, "This will smell like regular Ice Blue, and I'll just buy that instead." Ho boy, was I wrong. My first impression was what impressions are meant to be: lasting. This stuff embedded itself in my memory forever as being the best smelling aftershave of all time. One sniff had me shamelessly smashing my nostril into the little plastic dispenser like I was snorting lines. This was a religious experience.

I promptly bought the bottle, used it, then bought another. And another. And another. For a year or two, this was my aftershave. I used it religiously. I never tired of it. And then, inexplicably, the drugstore in my neighborhood stopped carrying it, as did every other store in the area. It was, what? Discontinued? Sent to a different region of the country? I'll never know. I grieved for a day or two, bought regular Ice Blue, and moved on. The greatest aftershave of all time was no longer available to me. 

By the time I reached my twenties, I was certain that Ice Sport had been discontinued. It was nowhere to be found in Connecticut, and must have been hard to find online, too, or I would've surely bought a bottle. Then, sometime in the last ten years, I noticed it had returned. Not to store shelves, but to internet listings for Aqua Velva, and I realized I could experience this wonderful elixir again. (I didn't until this fall.)

Why's it so special? It's Gillette Cool Wave, with the bitterness replaced by a lick of raspberry sweetness, the novel fruit note dosed so gently into the dihydromyrcenol that it hovers in the outer periphery of detectibility. There isn't much, if any, citrus. There's not even that much dihydromyrcenol. Yet it's so nineties that when I splash it on I see Carson Daly's big blue doe eyes pleading with hordes of post-pubescent bimbos to Total Request Live anything other than Ray of Light (does Charlie Sheen holding a candy bar to Kristy Swanson's back mean something to you).  Even the label, boasting a "vitamin-enriched" formula, hearkens back to the healthnut craze of the Clinton era. I can almost hear the Native American New Age music as I type this.

Ice Sport is potent. Nineties powerhouse potent. It would make a good cologne. This is what I would want an Ice Blue cologne to smell like, if such a thing existed today. It's fresh, but also warm, sweet. But not obnoxiously sweet. It's glacé, playfully saccharine, a lilting song of a smell that carries its CD tune on the air with a lightness that fills the room. It raises the obvious question: Why don't perfumers use raspberry more often? What prevents the judicious use of such a rich, wonderful note? When will someone invent a time machine so I can go back and browbeat my Victoria's Secret catalog-hoarding self into asking Jessica Janus out after study hall? 

Aqua Velva Musk (Combe Inc.)

Back in the late 1950s, Max Factor released a fragrance for men called Signature, and it smelled like a cross between Royal Copenhagen and Creed's Orange Spice, with the cheapness of the former subdued, and the richness of the latter abundant. Signature was "cheap" by 1950s standards. It was meant to be a fresh citrus musk oriental, and in lieu of real ambergris, it contained very potent, powdery aldehydes. But it also boasted several gorgeous nitro-musks, which undergirded the woody sweetness of orange and bergamot with a smooth, slightly animalic element.

Aqua Velva Musk reminds me of Signature, as a modernized version of it. The same basic structure is present: woody citrus, aldehydes, musk. But instead of powdery citrus richness, AVM offers a very taut, postmodern, reductionist approach. The citrus is neutered from fruit down to suggestive sweetness; powdery notes are just textural dessication; there is musk, but it's cheap skin musk, which Coty crated into the 1990s by the barrel. If Signature is the oil painting, AVM is the college dorm room poster, framed by a vintage-styled amber color to the fluid.

It makes me wonder if Aqua Velva Musk is actually the original Aqua Velva, released before Ice Blue took over the market. Has it simply been reissued as Musk? Given its similarities to a sixty year-old predecessor, I'm tempted to think this is the case. I also wonder if Olivier Creed considered American aftershaves (in addition to Kouros) when he hired Pierre Bourdon to make Orange Spice. It would explain why the Creed smells so disarmingly simple and versatile, as opposed to the complex masterpiece by YSL. All told, AVM is a very good offering, and worth checking out if you need another alcohol-based lotion with glycerin.

Aqua Velva's Reformulation Is . . .

Most shave-conscious men over thirty are aware that Combe Inc. reformulated Aqua Velva a few years ago and transferred it from glass to plastic. I remember the gnashing of teeth on Badger & Blade like it was yesterday. Die-hard fans were outraged. They cited Old Spice as an example of what happens when giant corporations cut costs and cheap out on formulas. Of course, the problem with their example is that Old Spice hasn't been hurt by the change at all. The Guide made a note of its former transience; Old Spice isn't just top notes anymore.

Aqua Velva "Classic" Ice Blue used to be a disappointing fragrance for me. Before I get into that, I'd like to say this: conceptually, Aqua Velva is brilliant. You have to remember that this aftershave hit the market in 1935, long before chemists had powerful synthetics at their disposal. But there were some useful man-made tools in their arsenal, and they were utilized well here. Ice Blue, though icy in name and color, was originally a minty-herbal-leathery chypre. 

But "minty-herbal" doesn't sound as refreshing as "Ice Blue", and a stroke of advertising genius positioned the fragrance as just the thing to cool razor-ravaged mancheeks. AV made menthol a starring note, and in this regard it was commercially peerless. It shared its territory with nothing else. This is remarkable, given the number of classic masculine chypres that followed. Aramis, Monsieur Lanvin, and Signoricci are the only ones that come close, but they showed up to the party thirty years later. 

I've only ever known Ice Blue from the early '90s onward. Between 1990 and 2009, not much about Ice Blue had changed. It underwent some minor tweaks as the years went by, changing corporate hands, gradually getting tweaked down and cheapened, but they kept it in a solid glass bottle. I think the suits behind Aqua Velva thought the glass bottle was a license to keep the fragrance formula somewhat complex, as though walls of crystallized sand could make the cheapest aroma chemicals smell like a successful balance of mint leaves, petit grain, lavender, moss, amber, and leather. Wrong. It smelled fine for about two minutes, very minty, green, fresh. And then the supposed "leather note" showed up, and ruined everything. It smelled dark, off-balance, wrong. It was a cheap element in a cheap formula for a cheap aftershave. It didn't work at all.

Fast-forward a few years. Some bigshot over at Combe says to himself, "We can make more money without glass. Fuck it, let's do one more tweak, pare this thing down for plastic, and call it a day." The chemists (probably donning their white lab coats in China) get busy, for all of two hours. They sit down at a table with a sample of the old formula for Ice Blue and wrinkle their noses. Americans use this shit? Whatever. They basically sit around idly for thirty minutes, trying to figure out how they can possibly take an already cheap-as-shit formula and make it passable for seasoned customers. Finally, one of them lights up. "Let's take this nasty brownish note out," he exclaims excitedly. The others furrow their brows, "like, really? that's all you wanna do?" And Mr. Bright Guy nods eagerly, "Yeah, let's ditch the old-shoe note, and just leave in the minty-green crap. In fact, we'll turn the mint up a notch, to compensate."

Another hour goes by, they fax the new formula back Stateside, and go to lunch. Thanks to their little lazy-genius streak, I'm a happier person. Aqua Velva's reformulation is great! There's absolutely no plastic after-smell. It's minty, freezing cold on skin, and for the first time in its history, smells like a smooth block of ice. Now, if only they'd release the Sport version in a bigger bottle . . .

Medicine Cabinet: A Tale of Three Aftershaves

I know I said this blog wouldn't mix perfume and aftershave, but I lied.

The truth is, I have to get something off my chest. Perfumes I understand - aftershaves I don't.

What bugs me about aftershaves is that they're typically watered-down and cheapened versions of otherwise-classy compositions. I mean, I can't imagine listening to a live performance of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and then settling on a scratchy cassette-tape radio recording as a souvenir. With Skin Bracer and Brut, the material for masterful opera is there, but the execution leaves much to be desired. It's like whoever was charged with formulating these fragrances graduated from Grasse in the top percentile, and immediately accepted briefs with $10 budgets.

Take, for instance, Brut:

Fabergé released their renowned ambery fougère in 1964, only to water it down and bottle it in plastic a scant four years later. Full of classical fougère elements, including lavender, lemon, oak moss, patchouli, and sandalwood, Brut's note pyramid exhibits all of the hallmark characteristics of a perfect masculine. And yet, it smells so . . . cheap. When I sniff the aftershave, I get the alcoholic vapors, something vaguely suggestive of mint and lemon, and then a massive, utterly unbalanced sweetness. Anise is in there, but instead of smelling floral and spicy, it's a bald cloud of coumarin. The cintronellol fields shallow against piles of oak moss and tree moss, and the whole thing ends up an odd combo of sweet 'n sour. It's like Clubman by Pinaud (which is an exceptional aftershave), only skanky, and unbearably sweet. It's a little too fetid for me to wear, even in the privacy of my home. I don't know. I really don't understand it.

Then there's Aqua Velva Ice Blue:

Originally by Williams, the makers of Aqua Velva got one thing right - psychologically, blue is more refreshing than green. After that, Aqua Velva loses me. For one thing, the scent doesn't smell blue at all. More of a dirty, minty greenish-brown. After a typical limonene (lemon), linalool (lavender), and peppermint opening, Aqua Velva slides into a weirdo combination of sweet musks and leathery woods. The leather note really presides over everything else, lending an unexpected darkness to the drydown. This is what makes Ice Blue a leathery chypre. Which would actually be a great thing, except the minty mouthwash top notes never entirely disappear. Instead, they mesh with the sweetened coumarin-leather whatever, which creates a sort of stained "freshness" accord. Me no likey. But me wanna likey, me wanna likey alot! All well. Perhaps someday someone from Combe Inc. can explain to me what the philosophy behind Aqua Velva's scent is. Maybe they could also explain why they've taken an already-challenged fragrance and doomed it before it even exits the bottle by making said bottle PLASTIC.

The best of the lot is Skin Bracer by Mennen:

I recently picked up a bottle of Skin Bracer, and I have to say, it's really nice. Nice enough that I wish it were a lot better than it currently is. It could also use a glass bottle, although Skin Bracer's switch to plastic isn't as recent as Aqua Velva's. If only these toiletry companies understood the deleterious effect of plastic on fragrance. Classified as a fresh fougère that trends ever-so-slightly into woody territory, this one is a little more abstract than its two compadres. It's like a Mark Rothko painting, with distinct blobs of scent transition that all somehow meld into one color. I get a distinct mint leaf from the top, intermingled with a very light lemon, which rapidly slides into a musty vanilla and leather base. The leather is more refined than the others, and the mint persists as the base fades. Eventually, when the darker notes are gone, the sweet freshness is all that's left. That, and my sense of ennui. Why, oh why can't this aftershave be made with better ingredients? 

I'd gladly pay twice as much for this, especially since this formula costs $9. Pretty pricey. But it could be better. It could incorporate hints of orange blossom to compliment the vanilla. There could be a little cedar to brighten the leather. Instead of a Rothko Print, I could have an original Rothko! Skin Bracer turns 80 this year, and given its age, Mennen should celebrate and turn up the volume on the scent. Sure, it'll always be a lowly alcohol-based aftershave, but that doesn't mean it has to smell like one.

Then again, maybe it's better to keep these aftershaves low-brow. Whether you're working on a lounge lizard moustache with Brut, a Bertie Wooster impression with Aqua Velva, or a Swedish Girl with Skin Bracer, you're working something.