When it comes to choosing cologne, men are such losers.
For instance, I’ll be the first to confess that I’m partial to Jovan Musk for Him, a cologne I chose on my own after first smelling it as a boy on my stepsister’s boyfriend Ira. I’m not admitting to wearing it these days, just to still liking it. After all, on the rare occasion when I smell it on a passerby, I’m immediately transported back to my high school days, back to thinking, Watch out, everyone, I’m walkin’ the halls and I’m smellin’ like musk. Just try to stay away from me.
I’m not, however, in the majority of men when it comes to how they choose those fragrances to which they’re loyal. And neither are the guys who wear Gaultier’s Le Male or the latest hip aroma from Dolce & Gabbana.
“Younger men see what their fathers had in the bathroom,” says Jean-Pierre Subrenat, past president of the New Jersey-based American Society of Perfumers, with a disappointed tone in his French-accented voice, as if he’d just been assaulted by a whiff of Brut by Faberge. “Then they go through life wearing Old Spice or Aqua Velva because it’s there, and they can find it for sale in food stores.”
In other words, of the three sectors of the men’s fragrance industry–mass market, direct sales and prestige–mass definitely beats class. Heavy-smelling Old Spice rules, while softer-scented Acqua Di Gio, from Armani, tools along, No. 1 in the prestige market last year, but still lagging far behind the sales of its cheaper counterparts.
If there’s a trend at all in men’s fragrances, says Lenka Contreras, consumer products manager at Kline & Co., which studies the cosmetics and toiletries market, it’s toward subtler scents, like Acqua Di Gio and last year’s No. 2 prestige scent, Curve, from Liz Claiborne. Such trends, she says, aren’t about the scents themselves as much as they are about fashion and where the manufacturers want to put their marketing dollars.
But for all the complaints of those in the fragrance industry–“Old Spice is still the leading brand in terms of overall sales,” groans Contreras–and men’s attitude toward it–“Men are not used to wearing cologne, like in France, where you grow up, your mother puts a little fresh cologne on you before you go to school in the morning, so when you turn a teenager you don’t think your masculinity is at stake if you put on aftershave,” grumbles Subrenat–it’s women who are doing most of the buying. According to Subrenat, 70 percent of all fragrance products–men’s and women’s–are purchased by women. “Most of the men in America who wear cologne,” he says, “wear things they received as gifts.”
In other words, it’s not entirely a man’s fault that he wears the cologne he wears. Moreover, most men (I suspect) don’t care that it was bought by someone else because, ultimately, they just don’t care about cologne, no matter how deliciously woodsy or spicy or herbaceous its aroma.
What those in the fragrance industry forget, I think, is that men want to smell, for better or for worse, like men. Not that we want to walk around smelling as if we just finished an Iron Man competition, but we do want to walk around feeling as if we did. “Sweat,” said Heywood Hale Broun, “is the cologne of accomplishment,” and I think most men would agree, even if the sweat is more figurative than literal.
But for those who do own and wear cologne, their choice of fragrance is still mostly influenced by their fathers on the one hand and the women in their lives on the other. The wearer has the least to do with it. “Old Spice is the top seller because it’s a habit,” says Subrenat. And we all know how easily old habits die.
My stepsister and Ira eventually parted ways, and I don’t know what became of him. But I hope he’s still using the same fragrance I remember so well. Perhaps I’ll pass him one day on the street and feel like a high school stud once again.
