In Fragrante Delicto
I am assured by the editors of this magazine that “the dandy” is back. Of course, this is exciting news. I look forward to the fall season when fashionable men will be primped and groomed like figure skaters, with burgeoning pumpkin cravats and ankle boots sharpened like Eberhard Fabers.
However, young squire, your right to exploratory vanity ends at my nose. Lay off the cologne.
Believe me, I understand the impulse. Males are taught from an early age that, left to our own devices, we smell bad. And, well, we sort of do. Against America’s pervasively astringent, odorless backdrop--the clean room where hygiene meets mass consumerism--any human scent has the faint reek of criminality.
Then there’s the psychology of cologne ads, which portray fragrances as something like aromatic Mickey Finns, elixirs that render females horny and stupid. In the Darwinistic dance of sexual competition, men will take any advantage they can get. Pectoral implants, for example.
No wonder we pour it on. The irony is that the most arousing and provocative male fragrance--the one that will make women’s clothes fly off like you’ve turned a leaf-blower on them--is Dial soap.
Karen Soza has smelled it all. She has worked the men’s cologne counter at the Nordstrom in the Glendale Galleria for going on 13 years, long enough for her nose to put in for workers’ comp. “We get immune to it,” Soza says, with just a touch of been-there-smelled-that ennui.
It’s a typical day behind her mirrored and bottle-spiked counter. Two teenagers are trying on cologne--one has sprayed the crook of his elbow and, in an effort to smell it, has his arm wrapped around his face like he’s running through a burning building. The other, eager to show off his sophistication, is hyperventilating into the jar of coffee beans. Soza--one of the store’s “certified fragrance specialists”--instructs them, weary and benevolent, an experienced older woman passing on the secret codes pour homme, a madam of the nose.
Men start coming to Soza as boys, often as young as 6 or 7 years old, wanting the same cologne that their dads wear--chips off the old block, if the block has top-notes of bergamot and grapefruit zest. Around 16, she says, boys start to assert their own fragrance preferences, a bid for pheromonal identity that’s as touching as it is atavistic in its lions-on-the-savannah way.
Soza agrees, young men wear much too much cologne. But not just young men. Older men often suffer a kind of olfactory impotence--they can’t smell the cologne, no matter how much they put on. Soza has smiled with pleasant astonishment while gentlemen spritz their bald heads until the stuff is running into their ears.
She spends a good part of her day saving her customers from the cologne industry’s propaganda. The effective range of cologne is about a hand’s width--not, as some cologne primers suggest, an arm’s length. Cologne should be a surprise, a discovery, a conspiracy shared between a man and a woman in a moment of accidental closeness, say, during the widely practiced but often fumbled air kiss. If people in your office can smell your cologne at arm’s length, trust me, they are looking for a way to turn the fire hose on you.
I don’t hold with Soza on some of the finer points of cologne wearing. She recommends that customers put it on the hot spots--the wrists, the throat, the back of the knees. The back of the knees? Only if you are moonlighting as a call girl.
And I’m very suspicious of the body chemistry theory. The truth is men aren’t that complicated. The idea that some cologne clashes with a given man’s exquisite natural scent is an invention of women trying diplomatically to tell their husbands or boyfriends that they smell like a French polecat.
It seems to me that not all cologne comes in a bottle. Spruce sawdust, pipe tobacco, Vaseline Intensive Care hand lotion, camphor desiccant like the kind you put in your toolbox. The smell of horses. I had a girlfriend who adored patchouli oil, and so I spent an entire summer smelling like an Amsterdam coffee house, and I would have rubbed myself with roadkill if she’d wanted.
And don’t underestimate the power of cheap drugstore cologne--Brut and English Leather and British Sterling and even the antiquarian Clubman by Pinaud. Some women go through life looking for a man who smells like dear old dad.
I don’t remember the first bottle of proper cologne I bought, or when, or how I came to know its fragrant mysteries. But I’m pretty sure I have someone like Soza to thank, some woman in a department store who took me by the hand and patiently led me to cologne’s sweet bower.
