Measuring That Sweet Smell of Success--or Whatever It Is
W hen a man wants to smell like a man, does he wear Brut or just sweat? Why is it that the women’s fragrance counter features splashy, enticing, come-hither point-of-purchase advertising and the men’s fragrance counter is nearly invisible? Are fragrances part of the ancillary, optional manly world, like colored underwear, or are they essential to the modern masculine image? Or are they just a lot of smelly liquid?
HE: I’ll admit to immediate confusion. You shower. You shave. You put on Skin Bracer after-shave to heal the damage.
But you’d really like to smell like, say, Paco Rabanne cologne. You can’t layer the stuff. What the hell do you do? Wait for a few hours until the after-shave wears off, shower again and then hit yourself with the cologne?
Or is this a fiendish marketing ploy to get you to buy the entire Paco Rabanne line so that everything smells the same?
SHE: Oooh, mmmm . . . Paco Rabanne! I still remember the time I got into an elevator and the air still carried the lingering traces of the last occupant’s Paco Rabanne cologne and I just went weak at the knees and . . . .
Sorry, you were saying? Oh yes, post-shaving skin bracing.
Are you telling me that Skin Bracer skin bracer is more bracing than a designer brand skin bracer?
HE: Skin Bracer is like lava. Filter it through a loaf of bread and you’ve got a martini. Smells OK, but that smell really hangs in there. I think a lot of guys would rather smell like nothing than smell of any fragrance. Although you’ve really got me curious about Paco Rabanne . . .
SHE: And your suspicions are correct. The men’s fragrance industry is nothing but a conspiracy between women and the marketing whizzes on Madison Avenue. Men may not care how they smell--in fact, it’s almost a given that they don’t--but they certainly do care about giving their female companion’s hormones a good working over. And isn’t that the bottom line?
HE: Yes, yes and yes. And why not? But with men’s fragrances, it seems like there are a zillion ways to blow it. One guy may think Polo is olfactory nirvana, but his wife or girlfriend might want to pour it in the cat box. Or he might give Armani a whirl and find out in the worst possible way that it was the standard of the ex-husband or boyfriend.
SHE: So? Don’t you try on a variety of jackets or pants until you find the one that’s right for you? Remember, fragrance is an even more personal statement than whether your jacket has one vent in the back or two.
Our sense of smell is our most intimate sense, so it should be worth a little extra effort to zero in on the one that will light her fire.
And just to unsissify the whole affair for you, manufacturers have bent over backward to keep the sales pitch as low-key as possible.
HE: OK, but demystify something for me. Apart from going back to the store each day for six months, dragging your poor significant other along with you, how do you choose? In one visit, you run out of skin to spray stuff on pretty quickly. And the real smell doesn’t settle in quickly, right? It takes a while.
SHE: I love how mellow you get when you cross the line into thinking like a woman. Yes, Virginia, it does take a little time and effort to put yourself together well, something we women have been trying to tell you men since Homo sapiens did his first double take. But--are we getting through to you?--it’s worth it.
HE: I love how aggressive you get when you cross the line into thinking like a man.
SHE: The question at hand, I believe, was how a man can select a cologne for himself with only two wrists to spray test but dozens of products to choose from?
I’d love to suggest you start by sniffing about the locker room and approaching a few of your friends with that timeless line, “Love your cologne, man! What’s it called?†but I know that’s not part of the locker-room protocol.
Start by sniffing the bottles on the counter. Now, of course the product will smell differently on your skin, but at least you will eliminate the ones you absolutely will not wear even if Kim Basinger asked you to.
HE: You know what you find in the locker room? That granddaddy of them all, Old Spice. Lots of guys fool around for a time with other scents in bottles shaped like shuttle boosters, but they always seem to come back to Old Spice. They smelled it on their dads. And women smelled it on their dads.
SHE: I presume that their dad smelling of Old Spice was much more pleasant than their dad smelling of Old Compost Heap or Old Toss the Ball Around With the Guys.
Look, we’re not saying that you guys smell bad. But women respond to smell. We bury our faces in a bunch of flowers, fill our bedrooms with potpourri and nuzzle freshly-powdered babies.
Look at the facts. We’ve put men’s colognes in the darkest, most discreet bottles possible. We’ve given them the most perfunctory, masculine names possible. And we’ve stocked them behind low-key, minimum profile counters at the back of the cosmetics department. Is it too much to ask you guys to just unscrew the top and use it?
