Old Spice "Long Lasting" Cologne (Shulton, 1980 - 1990 Vintage)

The 1980s ushered in my favorite period for Old Spice, perhaps from personal nostalgia. This was the decade when American Cyanamid opted to repurpose the brand image and moved the red logo lettering above the blue ship graphic. They slapped a blue and gold band around the box lettering and called it "Long Lasting Cologne" to drive the longevity and "powerhouse" inference home. This version of Old Spice saw a bit more cola-like brightness in the opening accord, and longevity is indeed pretty impressive, clocking in at no less than ten hours. Beautiful stuff.

Aside from that, there isn't a whole lot else to say about it. If you're familiar with the scent of Old Spice, here it is, yet again. My own view is perhaps unpopular, but I think the lettering above the ship looks sharper than prior iterations of these graphics. The visual balance is better. I also enjoy that Shulton kept the traditional red box with the larger ship graphic, and I even like that they put "long lasting" in front of "cologne" to make an unnecessary point about the cologne concentration, which is really an eau de toilette concentration. This stuff is strong. Old Spice is strong in general. Whoever it was that said it's "fleeting" clearly didn't know what he was talking about, because this fragrance is anything but. In vintage form it is practically eau de parfum strength. 

I believe this will be the last vintage era of the scent that I review, not because I've tired of it, but rather for lack of access to any other vintages. I've given you early 1950s through to the present. I've yet to see 1940s Old Spice on eBay or elsewhere. I imagine someone like Bill Gates or Elon Musk has a full bottle of it with zinc stopper #1 resting comfortably atop the Hull Pottery Company's bottle, but doubt that I'll ever have a chance to own one myself. Hope springs eternal, and I still keep an eye out. It's important to remember that these first issue bottles weren't made very well, and leakage was a big problem, which makes the likelihood of ever finding one that much slimmer. 

To sum it all up, Old Spice hasn't changed very much in its 87 years of existence. I slapped on the current (c. 2019) formula yesterday, and marveled at how similar to the vintages it smelled. The biggest difference occurred in the late 1960s, when the archival Shulton formula was forced to change due to increasing restrictions on nitro musks. The 1950s version smells much woodier, muskier, and sweeter than anything from the 1970s onward. I found the 1970s formula to be a touch muskier and more powdery. 

The 1980s formula has less musk but what feels to me like an extra dash of cinnamon and nutmeg. The 1990s P&G formula streamlines the scent's facets, and that version carries on virtually unchanged to the present, although I have yet to try 2020s Old Spice, so perhaps that will be a future review. 

Nineteen-Eighties Old Spice is Not Like Other Old Spice.

I recently picked this up for two dollars from a lady who must've had it in her house for forty years, and to my surprise it smells (and feels) like new! Old Spice Conditioning After Shave, which is a runny balm, smells exactly like the liquid aftershave, but in the eighties formula, which was a touch brighter and spicier than previous versions. Of the 4.25 fl. oz. size, there is maybe 3.75 ounces remaining. This particular bottle dates from 1985, and is product id 3709. The product was introduced in 1984, and discontinued in 1987.

I say "discontinued" even though the product of Old Spice Conditioning After Shave ostensibly lived on until at least 1991, as mentioned on oldspicecollectibles.com. I have a bottle from the 1988-1991 era, which is dark blue with a flip-up cap, but the fragrance is completely different and in no way resembles Old Spice (it smells more like Icy Hot). The sticker on the front says, "New! Improved!" Yes, new fragrance, which smells like crap. Of course, the fact that it's thirty-five years old doesn't help, except the even older after shave smells just fine. So, not sure what that's about. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

I'm usually put off by old aftershaves. To me, the thought of using something on my face that expired decades ago is disgusting. My Mendoza Line for shave products is early 2000s, maybe late nineties. But mid-eighties? Here's the thing, though: eighties Old Spice is not like other Old Spice. I don't know what they did to the formula during that period, but it smelled fresher and crisper than previous iterations. I figured my nose and fingers don't lie. If the stuff smells and feels weird to the touch, forget it. Amazingly it smelled fresh (but vintage) and felt great, a non-greasy lotion that leaves minimal tack for only a minute after use, which then vanishes (they put alcohol in the pre-1988 version). 

I also think this product is much older than the eighties, and suspect it dates back to 1965, when it was called After Shave Skin Conditioner. A different name, but essentially the same product. They jockeyed that name around from that year to 1984, switching once in the mid-seventies to Old Spice Skin Conditioner, and in the late-seventies to Old Spice Aftershave Conditioner ("Aftershave" as one word). Why they changed the fragrance in the late eighties is beyond me, unless the stuff in my bottle is expired Icy Hot that someone put in there in lieu of the real product (why anyone would do that is anyone's guess). 

Old Spice Cologne (Shulton, 1950-1955 Vintage), & Some Incorrect Notions About Old Spice That I've Been Reading For Years

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 Procter & 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 Procter & 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 Procter 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 Procter & 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! 

The Archeological Endeavor of Excavating My "Deep Vintage" Old Spice Cologne

I recently bought a bottle of "deep vintage" Old Spice cologne, a bottle with stopper #2 made between 1950 and 1955. To be clear, I consider any bottle with stopper #1 or #2 to be "deep vintage." My bottle is about 60% full (a light test reveals the level to be almost exactly where the taper of the buoy begins), and is in fair cosmetic shape - faded but legible graphics, a small dent on an otherwise pristine metal stopper cowl - yet it arrived with a problem. The kind of problem I only encounter with things as old as early 1950s Old Spice: the stopper top snapped off in transit, and the rest of it is lodged flush in the spout, completely blocking the removal of fluid. 

This sounds like a major setback, but in reality it's no big deal. It delays the experience of wearing and reviewing the stuff, but it's merely a delay - I have other bottles I can decant the cologne into. This situation demands some "excavating" be done to access the cologne, which is sequestered by a seventy year-old chunk of broken polyethylene, so I made a plan. When my 1955-1963 bottle is empty, I'll use a small nail to tap the stopper down into the bottle, and then use a decanting pipette to transfer the cologne (now with a piece of plastic floating in it) into the available container. I'll then use what is left of the stopper to reseal the older empty bottle, and simply use it for display. Issue resolved. 

This situation does have me reflecting on how vintage Old Spice is the only vintage fragrance that feels archeological in nature. The picture above is of an empty 1940s Hull Pottery bottle on eBay, and just take a look at it. Doesn't it look like something recovered from the wreck of the Titanic? It's a product of twentieth century America, and there are still plenty of people walking around today who were alive when it was made, yet it looks like it was recovered from the bottom of the ocean. Its glaze is cracked, there are oxidation marks everywhere, and its hand-painted graphics, likely stenciled on mere moments before the pottery was fired, are primitive in nature. It's Indiana Jones fare. 

My bottle, made by the Wheaton Glass Company, is not nearly as rustic looking, but it bears a similar overall design. The base is embossed with the words Early American Old Spice, which hearkens back to the days when Shulton pitched this fragrance to women. Old Spice is America's only true wartime cologne, released a year before the start of World War II, and issued in smaller, simpler bottles to troops abroad. It survived the war, and the intervening eighty years, and is a testament to American masculinity. My bottle stirs echoes of that time, and all of its mythical archetypes, and when I shake it and hear liquid sloshing around, I wonder how a pedestrian drugstore cologne managed to survive. It's amazing to me that it wasn't used up and discarded decades ago.

It leaves me wondering what is possible in the quest for deep vintage Old Spice. Are there pristine Hull Pottery bottles out there? (When I say 'pristine,' I mean bottles that still contain original fluid.) How many might exist? Ten? Twenty? What fractional percentage of vintages precede the Vietnam War? Of that small number, how many zeros go before the decimal point for extant Korean War bottles, i.e. bottles like the one sitting on my desk as I write this? And of those, how many more zeros must be added to the decimal to accurately convey the number of surviving WWII bottles? And of those, how many are original Hull Pottery bottles with rust-free stopper #1? A full four-ounce bottle of Hull Pottery Old Spice is, without exaggeration, the Holy Grail of wetshaver deep vintages.

Friendship Garden (Shulton)

Released in 1939 and discontinued in the early seventies, Early American Friendship Garden by Shulton was the brand's "green" floral springtime splash. (How's that for alliteration?) I happened across two interesting things at an antique store last week, a stone head of Buddha that could be worth thousands and was only priced in the hundreds, and a four ounce bottle of this stuff, which I sampled. I didn't buy either, but they were the only items that piqued my interest and have me thinking of returning for purchases. 

Friendship Garden comes in an eau de cologne concentration; it only lasts about two hours and doesn't project beyond a couple of inches. It's an aldehydic floral that reminds me of the current iteration of Wind Song by Prince Matchabelli. The differences to my nose are its bitterness and the absence of stone fruit notes like peach and plum. Wind Song has the character of a typical fifties fruity-floral, with a sweet and powdery aura that grows woodier as it dries, but Friendship Garden remains fairly cool, green, and bitter from top to bottom. There's a lick of crisp bergamot and galbanum on top, followed five minutes later by a gauzy haze of geranium, dandelion, lavender, and the cut-grass generalized aroma of wildflowers, whatever they might be. Think the tart and very light smell of some random colorful bouquet you can buy for fifteen dollars at your local supermarket, and you have an idea of FG's heart. Green, vaguely floral and herbal, a bit flat, and totally forgettable.

The far drydown is a rather sour lemony musk, with just the faintest hint of woodiness, and little to no charm beyond a memory of what preceded it. Friendship Garden isn't really a great fragrance in my opinion, but it was a significant release for its time. I found a bottle advertised for $3 in a December, 1942 issue of Life Magazine. Adjusting for inflation to today's dollar, and that comes to fifty bucks. Not cheap. If you find a bottle for a few dollars, grab it, but this isn't anything an avid collector should lose sleep over.

Old Spice Cologne (Shulton, 1955 - 1963 Vintage)

To think, people turned their noses up at smelling this good.

The thing that irks me about Luca Turin's review of Old Spice in Perfumes: The Guide is the hint that he isn't reviewing the most recent formula (circa 2008), but a formula that dates back to at least 1963, with "the weird, thin little conical stopper."

It raises my ire because (a) 98% of his readers didn't catch his sleight of verbiage, and (2) they purchased a review they were unlikely to benefit from. I'd be more forgiving if he had referred this way to a lesser fragrance, but to garner Old Spice, the king of masculine orientals, with an elliptical and inaccurate review reduces the utility of his message to an anecdote without context. Why was he reviewing such an old formula? Was the exclusion of any comment on the Procter & Gamble version meant to be an indirect dismissal of it, or is he only familiar with vintage Shulton?

I'll lay off Turin, a pleasant man who has always been nice to me, with this final thought: Eisenhower-era Old Spice is anything but "transient." Have you ever smelled Old Spice from six decades ago? I'm smelling it right now, and I'm here to tell ya, this stuff is potent. It opens with a kick of woody sweetness (think overdone Crème brûlée), and 90 proof Highland scotch. The whiff I get from the spout is one of the best things I've ever smelled, and I'm not exaggerating. It's a smoky vanilla that feels far sturdier and more comforting than expected. It's quite different from the 1970s formula, which was brighter and muskier. I have to admit, I love it.

It smells like time has altered the fragrance a bit. While the 70s formula radiates several feet but vanishes when sniffed up close, the 50s formula has presence from afar and up close. Just a couple of splashes fills the room, and keeps filling the room for a good four hours, minimum. Again, I attribute this in part to the fragrance's age. Time has turned the fizzy beauty of this vintage into a toasty vanilla base with incredible tenacity. Like its Vietnam-era younger brother, this version lacks dynamism, and doesn't move much after the first minute of wear, but its linearity shifts in subtle layers, with twinges of various resins weaving in and out of focus throughout the wear time. Its resinous texture must be the effect of its aged spice notes, with the cinnamon and nutmeg having adopted a beautiful incense-like tonality.

There's really no reliable way to know exactly which year my bottle is from, but my guess is it's a late 50s issue, maybe early 60s, possibly sold in Canada, as it says "Toronto" on the back. Again, not sure, but its trippy, thin little conical stopper confirms that this "cologne for men" is indeed the real deal, a somewhat deeper vintage than I've smelled before, and I'm happy I found a bottle on ebay for $11. Now, if only everyone could buy it for that price at their corner drugstore, we could all enjoy the fragrance Luca Turin and I have reviewed. Instead you're likely in possession of the current stuff in plastic, which is just as good, albeit different, and easier to wear.

To avoid confusion: Turin's review may have referenced a bottle of OS from the early 1950s (pre-'56) with stopper #2, which also had the "conical" stopper, but any difference in fragrance between these years is likely splitting hairs. My bottle, shown in the picture, has stopper #3 and the graphics style that predates the 1967 changeover. Bottles from '67 to '70 still had stopper #3, but changed over to #4 in the early '70s - my other bottles are from that period (cologne & aftershave).

I asked the creator of the invaluable blog Old Spice Collectibles if there was a way to more precisely date my bottle, but he was unable to help. Here's his reply:

"Thanks for your note. Unfortunately the dating cannot be more precise.  I base it on visible characteristics such as graphics, volume, etc.  As long as those stay constant over a period of years there is no good way to place an item more precisely."

Fair enough, but I still wonder if the manufacturing marks and the number stamped on the bottom of the bottle ("7" in my case) could indicate the precise year of manufacture. If anyone out there has verifiable information on this, and could refer me to a source, I'd appreciate a few tips!

Old Spice Cologne (Shulton, 1970 - 1973 Vintage)

In the world of "non-luxury perfumes," few have a reputation as gargantuan as 1970s Old Spice. Last year I was fortunate enough to find a bottle of early seventies Old Spice cologne for a great price, and bought it. I wanted a vintage cologne for the bottle more than the scent. As much as I appreciate vintage, I hate the Procter & Gamble bottles (cheap, crappy plastic) more than I love the vintage scent.

I don't even hate the fact that P&G uses plastic. The change in container material isn't a big deal. What pisses me off is the piss poor logo they print on the new stuff. That dumb "patch" with its microscopic ship is an eyesore. I can't understand what the design department at P&G is thinking with that thing. I've ranted about this before, and won't go on about it here, but just wanted to briefly touch on it again. The vintage Shulton milk glass bottles are pretty much the same size, shape, and color as their successors, but are superior in sporting beautiful scarlet script and the iconic grey-blue graphic of the Grand Turk, and at a size I can actually see.

The scent's reputation precedes it, although this is not obvious to casual observers. You have to be a fraghead to understand the extent of cultural murmurings about seventies Old Spice. The decade is known for a plethora of loud and super musky (super "fly") compositions, and the idea is that Old Spice entered a more full-bodied era in the Nixon years, likely following the zeitgeist. The problem in 2020 is that the fragrance is now nearly fifty years old. Orientals are known for having good staying power, and a good formula can likely survive twenty or thirty years with minimal changes. But pushing a half century is, put simply, pushing it.

The fragrance has survived, but only barely. It's wearable, and it still smells good, but its dynamism is nonexistent, and its balance long gone. Instead of the fizzy pop of orange skin, orange flower, ambergris, aldehydes, clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg familiar to me in my now long-gone 1980s vintage (which was only twenty-five years old when last I wore it), the seventies juice emits a super-smooth burst of aldehydes, which last a mere ten seconds or so, followed by an intense bourbon vanilla, very deep and musky, almost as if I've dribbled vanilla extract on my arm, which quickly dries to a powdery skin musk, made extra dusky by hints of cinnamon and clove.

Where the vintage excels is in its depth. Procter & Gamble managed to make their reformulation shimmery and pert, especially in freezing cold winter conditions, but it rarely gives an impression of durability. Shulton's formula achieves an odd trick; once applied, the wearer is treated to something that seems to radiate five or six inches from skin, without actually smelling like much up close. Although it pretends to disappear ten minutes after application, I often get a whiff of powdery vanilla five or six hours after application, and in a way that seems to drift through the air. This kinetic effect is remarkable for being both softly tenacious and engaging. It's essentially a rich vanilla base that doesn't smell cheap because it doesn't smell like a cologne.

How the chemists for Shulton developed this kind of oriental base is beyond me. I suspect there's real vanilla extract in there. But the powder, talc-like and quintessentially barbershop in nature, lends this simple note an abstract quality that I haven't encountered in recent fragrances. When I wear it, I feel like I'm emitting a vanilla essence from my sweat. The vague dusting of spice lends it animalism, but its sweet song is crystal clear, unembellished by chemical harmonies, a direct example of masculinity as melody. I wish the spices had held up more, and can't detect the ambergris that I know Shulton used, but I like it. It's really good stuff.

I also bought a bottle of 1970s vintage aftershave, but I got rid of the juice. It was probably fine, and I was probably just imagining danger, but something about using fifty year-old aftershave didn't appeal to me, and there was a touch of rancidity in the oils that sealed its fate. I refilled the bottle with current aftershave, and that works fine. The aftershave bottle dates between 1973 and 1980. I imagine it's from the late seventies, judging by the condition of the bottle.

If you enjoy Old Spice as much as I do, getting a vintage bottle is still a viable option, especially if you just want the bottle. But if looks don't bother you, the new stuff is still very good and worthy of use. Just don't make me look at that shitty packaging. I would give my left leg to take control of the package design department at P&G so I could dial the clock back to a more comfortable and less cost-efficient date! But with that said, I'd probably struggle to keep my job.

Why I Went Back to Vintage Old Spice (And Gave Up On Wearing Everything Else)

When I started my fragrance journey back in 2008, I was in possession of 1980s vintage Old Spice aftershave and cologne, made by Shulton, but had not yet acquired an appreciation for them, and sold both bottles on eBay for about twenty-five dollars. I've regretted it ever since.

Recently I repurchased vintage Old Spice, this time from the 1970s, and I haven't looked back. In the intervening years, I've explored every nook and cranny of the fragrance world, and it's been quite an interesting trip. My collection is roughly one hundred bottles (maybe closer to eighty-five "proper" fragrances), and most of them are fragrances I truly enjoy, or else I would never have kept them. One thing has bothered me though: it gets complicated when you own this many EDTs. All sorts of factors are considered. Is it too cold outside for this fragrance? Too hot? Is it the wrong occasion to wear this? Is this too loud? Is this too feminine? Am I sending the wrong message if I wear this to a cookout? At times the scale of choice, the sheer immensity of variety begins to feel like a hindrance rather than an advantage, and I've been keenly aware of how often that feeling occurs, and how pervasive it has become.

I've been a member of Badger & Blade for ten years, and the wetshaver community has many overlaps with the mainstream "fragcomm." Wetshavers are into colognes and aftershaves and eau de toilettes, but naturally the primary focus is shaving. A good shave requires all sorts of extraneous skin care, and the average diligent wetshaver, even a minimalist like me, has at least a half dozen products that work in tandem to keep shorn skin healthy and glowing. Witch hazel, balms, talcs, various kinds of alcohols and alcohol-based aftershaves, all are useful tools in the pursuit of the perfect shave. But even in this community, variety has taken over. Obama's second term saw the rise of "small batch" aftershave companies, an industry not unlike that of craft beer. Suddenly there are tons of inexpensive glass bottles with home-printed labels carrying liquids called "4:20," and "Red Hot Jeeper-Creeper," and all sorts of zany names, and when I dipped back into B&B a few months ago, I hardly recognized the landscape.

The fragrance industry as a whole has exploded to a size where Big Bang analogies are apt. I’ve watched Youtubers with collections that suggest a mall kiosk swallowed their homes. Some of these guys have around $100K worth of fragrance, all carefully organized on custom shelves, all averaging $250 a bottle. If thieves broke in with grocery carts and loaded up, they'd take a loss big enough to equal the cost of the newest Corvette. Even my collection, modest as it is, has a few valuable oldies that I could probably make a grand on. I can't even imagine what it must be like to have the entire Tom Ford range stacked under the entire Creed range, under the entire Guerlain range, and on, and on. How does a guy with that kind of collection get a chance to stop and actually enjoy any of it?

I began noticing something about myself. I would watch a Charles Bronson movie, or a Steve McQueen movie, or any pre-1980s movie, with the sort of testosterone-laden, ultra-masculine star that Hollywood is no longer allowed to cultivate, and I'd find myself thinking, "That guy wasn't obsessed with cologne. That guy was an Old Spice guy." Sure, Bronson danced around in those Mandom commercials from Japan, but in real life he probably used whatever drugstore cheapie was available, and didn't give it a second thought. He was more interested in spending his millions on cars and women.

These men depicted characters that were simple and direct. They perform heroic feats that defy imagination. They bed gorgeous women without a glimmer of self doubt. They aren't real life. But they were templates of the ideal that men once admired. Today they're victims of cancel culture, the toxic zeitgeist of perceived misogyny, symbols of the "patriarchy," and probably considered bigots and racists by humorless, self-hating upper middle-class white people. Bronson, McQueen, Lee Van Cleef, all are lucky they're dead. Last year on WNPR (a public radio network), a black woman said she considers the movie Gone With The Wind a Confederate monument. Clark Gable wouldn't stand a chance with her. But Clark Gable was probably an Old Spice guy. I can't imagine that he would bother with anything stronger, anything more expensive, or anything less American than the Shulton classic.

Then last June I got a promotion at work. The new position has me working in closer quarters with two women who are very olfactorily aware of their surroundings, and I realized that sheer necessity would switch my macro frag world down to something micro. I needed something I really liked, something easy to wear, something cheap enough to bring and leave in the car, and most importantly, something that wouldn't piss anyone off. My position is a sort of "middle management" role, which means people are looking to me for some leadership. It didn't take long to figure out what I needed. The only oriental I ever really liked was Old Spice, and the only drugstore frag that doesn't smell "cheap" is vintage Old Spice. So I hopped on eBay and found what I needed, an aftershave that dates between 1973 and 1980, and a cologne that predates 1973. I wasn't buying vintage for their contents, however.

As much as I appreciate the vanilla smoothness of vintage Old Spice, I think the current formula is actually quite good. Procter & Gamble did an excellent job maintaining the overall quality and identity of the scent, despite the odds. They royally fucked up the packaging though. It has gotten to the point with those godforsaken plastic bottles, with their godawful "patch" logos, where I couldn't abide them anymore. That P&G thought it necessary to switch to plastic is one thing, but to strip the plastic of the beloved Grand Turk is another level of stupid. So back to the Wheaton-style milk glass, with their beautiful script font, and those glorious ships. If I'm wearing something every day, I want to like the bottle I'm reaching for.

Am I done with fragrance? No. I still enjoy fragrance, I still value variety, and I still see exploring the fragrance world as something worthy of pursuit. I'm not through with fragrance, but I'm through with a "rotation." I'm working on developing a very small wardrobe for regular use. But for the time being, I'm enjoying simplicity. I don't want to be an overly perfumed Millennial jerk anymore. I don't want to smell like a fourteen year-old girl, or spend four hundred dollars just to piss off a woman fifteen feet away. I want to smell like a man. I want to smell like a man from the past. And I want to smell discreet. In this day and age, discretion is key to my survival, and also the key to my success. With Old Spice, discretion is handled very, very well. Thank goodness for small favors.