How To Smell Like A Man
A splash of old school cologne can bring back bittersweet memories
Growing up there was a clear line as to what constituted safe scents and scary ones.
My dysfunctional home was scary. It smelled of cheap beer piss frothed up in the toilet after one of my Dad’s benders. It smelled of hands covered in car grease and blood and the powdery sweet concealer covering up my mom’s bruises. When I went to my Grandparents’ home things smelled much better. It was a combination of rose-scented Avon products and the greasy joy of Kentucky Fried Chicken and biscuits with a Dr. Pepper to wash it all down.
But the safest smell was my grandpa, the one good man in my life. He smelled like Old Spice. The iconic cologne was initially made for women. William Lightfoot Schultz created the fragrance that he said was inspired by his mom’s potpourri, and it launched in 1937 to great success. A year later, Old Spice for men was born and quickly became the Shulton Company’s biggest seller.
If little boys were made of ‘snips and snails, and puppy-dogs’ tails’ when I was younger I would have guessed that Old Spice was the primary ingredient in what made a good man. The cologne’s early slogan, The Mark of a Man, seemed to be a nod to that idea.
