In 2020, the year of coronavirus, I came to a fork in the road. I’d just turned 50, a moment of looking back over your life, realising what you’ve failed to achieve, and accepting there’s only a finite number of years left to you. It was clearly a time for making a change of some sort, something fundamental and radical, and I duly made one. I faced reality, took myself in hand, and decided to switch to a new aftershave.
Until then, it had been Dunhill Edition all the way. Launched in 1984, it had caught me in my mid-teens, was my first taste of adult sophistication (Jeremy Irons wore it!) and it hadn’t really occurred to me in the intervening decades to wear anything else. Indeed, for a man to pay too much attention to such things seemed – and still does – slightly infra dig.
There is of course a rabbit hole neatly prepared for people with such interests
Yet in the year of my half century I became obsessed – and I mean obsessed – with finding a good replacement, and soon I was haunting the perfume-halls of large stores and spraying so many liquids onto so many strips of card it was getting embarrassing. Perhaps it was a case of mid-life madness but I took heart from some dying words from my uncle, delivered to his son. Too many people, he said, who indulged all the other four senses willy-nilly – neglected their sense of smell. Life was full of wonderful smells, there for the enjoying, and we forgot this at our peril.
This resonated with me. My own life, as I looked back, seemed to have been a succession of smells with the power to depress or delight. At prep-school, floor polish mixed with disinfectant (a combination that can still chill me) or, later, the aroma of beer in pubs or chlorine in swimming pools – two things that always make me feel, in some way, a little geed up, as though I’ve come home. On visits to provincial department stores in my childhood, the wall of perfumey smells greeting me as I walked in, along with the blast of warmth, convinced me that I was entering a finer, nobler world than anything the streets of Ipswich and Colchester had to offer. There were smells associated with specific people as well – not just the BO or halitosis of schoolmasters, but the aftershave my uncle wore (Trumper’s Portugal Water), my father’s shaving soap (Palmolive), or that intoxicating blend of wine and cigarettes girls had, in my teenage years, on their breath at parties, and which I expect vaping has now done for.
There is of course a rabbit hole neatly prepared for people with such interests, albeit a Neroli-scented one. Fragrantica.com, the fragrance-review website, breaks down each perfume into its core components, and tells you which fragrances are good for the summer and which for the winter (an important point, as anyone who’s stood near someone wearing Kouros in August will agree). It teaches you to mistrust the ‘opening blast’ of a fragrance, designed to seduce as it leaves the bottle, and instead to wait for the ‘drydown’ 20 minutes later, which will tell you what the product is really like. A better metaphor for many relationships in life can barely be imagined.
You also get schooled in matters such as ‘sillage’ (the strength of the aroma-stream that trails in your wake), ‘projection’ (the intensity of its emanation from the body) or ‘longevity’ – how long the perfume lasts before you’ll need to spray again. The last seemed important to me, the first two less so – I didn’t want to reek of the stuff or overpower a room and recalled, in a scene in Woody Allen’s Interiors that men should take note of, two women sniggering, behind one character’s back, at the way his aftershave permeates the house. Some colognes instantly lower the status of the wearer, and in my intensive tour of the perfume world it was instructive to find out what I personally disliked. I had an aversion, I realised, to scents that were too sweet, ingratiating or love-me-love-me (sandalwood was often a culprit here) or to those that were overpowering and could actually mar a social event (Floris Elite and Dior Fahrenheit step forward). I liked, I discovered, idiosyncratic, slightly aloof, subtle colognes, or ones that simply made you smell clean.
If all this focus on something apparently so frivolous seems cringeworthy, I should point out there are legions of YouTubers doing it 24/7, year in, year out – people for whom fragrances hold the same fascination which Bach, New Wave cinema or the world of single malts does for others. Surrounded by bottles, experts in breaking down scent-combinations, they convince you that there are those out there who buy perfumes not to wear but simply to open and inhale as works of art. Scent specialists don’t quite persuade you to take it as earnestly as they do, but to respect the fact there are some who do, whose sense of smell is as acute as others’ ear for music or eye for visual art; those like ‘Jeremy Fragrance’, a rather cocky, feline German; Monika Cioch, the Nigella Lawson of the perfume bottle; and ‘Clemence CC’, an oh-zo-French girl broadcasting about the subject, rather charmingly, from her boudoir. And perhaps they (and my uncle) are right. Given that we rhapsodise over symphonies, paintings and dishes, why shouldn’t we treat the world of confected smells with equivalent seriousness, if only for a while?
My own fascination with the topic – I wanted, unsurprisingly, to get back to other matters – had a strict time-limit, and ended the day I found a couple of aftershaves I could settle on. One, after much sampling, was Terre d’Hermes, an intriguingly bitter orange and grapefruity blend whose mystique – like wine or olives – grows on you, till you spend your time wondering what it is exactly you like about it and why it keeps calling you back. The other was Guerlain Homme Ideal ‘Cool’ (in the sense of temperature, not street-cred), a minty, almondy, soapy concoction which is the exact smell – as one Fragrantica reviewer pointed out – of a bathroom in childhood after your father has just shaved and brushed his teeth in it. Guerlain Cool – like so many things which are good or which you love – has now been discontinued, but I managed to buy four bottles of old stock at Tbilisi Aiport (Duty Free there hadn’t got the memo) and perhaps that’s a lifetime’s supply. More likely though is that one day it will simply run out and become a memory, never to exist in that exact form again, or will only be purchasable on eBay at ruinously inflated prices. Then my search for an alternative cologne will doubtless begin again – an inconvenience, I suppose, but one I’ll just have to take on the nose.
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