Via Libertas: Andrew Klavan (whom I want to be when I grow up… or down…) takes former President Clinton to pieces, discards the polystyrene filler, and finds about a microgram of substance left today, in this LA Times opinion piece.
Today was a turning day in Minnesota weather. Yesterday was nice, and today was nice until the afternoon (coincidentally just about the time I took my walk). The skies clouded up and rain began spattering. Tomorrow promises to be heavy jacket weather, with more chance of rain. The trees are beginning to slip into their clown outfits.
I’ve got a lot of caulking to do.
I bought a new bottle of Old Spice aftershave today. I’ve been off it for a while, for reasons I’ll explain (I know you won’t sleep if I don’t tell you), but I realized it’s really my favorite inexpensive brand. Nothing else measures up. So I re-stocked.
My main reason for not buying it was typically substantive, for me. I was angry about the packaging.
Remember the old Old Spice bottles? They had historical sailing ships on them, “etched” in blue to look like scrimshaw. They even noted the ships’ names. I loved those bottles. I loved to have them lined up in my medicine cabinet.
Then Procter & Gamble acquired them, and some hotshot went in to shake things up. “Old Spice is dull,” he probably said. “Old Spice is an old man’s brand. Old Spice is the Oldsmobile of shaving products.”
So he zipped it up. Gone were the proud old clippers, as if in a hurricane. In their place we found a yuppie sailboat, something designed to please Ted Turner.
I don’t want hip aftershave. I don’t want aftershave that promises to turn me into a 23-year-old, cocaine-thin male model with collagened lips and face stubble. I want aftershave with a sense of history.
I want my ships back!
What do I get instead? A new picture on the bottle. It features a small red and blue banner with a teeny-weeny little sailboat on top of it. The whole thing is lost in a vast expanse of blank, off-white bottle.
I’ll bet their next project is to paint the bottle green and shape it like a human sexual organ.
As a longtime fan of Old Spice (and probably one of the many reasons I’ve never been popular with the feminine persuasion)I always thought of the ship on the bottle as one bringing back spices from all over the world. (Of which several books have been written recently.)
From Etymology online; Spice;
– c.1225, from O.Fr. espice, from L.L. species (pl.) “spices, goods, wares,” from L. “kind, sort” (see species). Early druggists recognized four “types” of spices: saffron, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg. Fig. sense of “slight touch or trace of something” is recorded from 1531. The verb, “to season with spices” is first recorded c.1325 (implied in spiced). Spicy is from 1562; in the fig. sense of “racy, salacious” it dates from 1844.
p.s. If one is serious one about the matter one would have to ask for female advice. (I hear that women have gone off Old Spice; but I’m sure I’d be the last to know.)
I guess that explains my bachelorhood. Drat these women! Don’t they know there’s more to a man than his smell?
(Not in my case, of course. But I was making a general point.)
I love Old Spice, though I haven’t used the aftershave in the cool bottle for years because I’ve received other stuff as gifts and don’t feel free to throw it out. None of it has repulsed me though, and I like the Aspen I got. I should seek out the OS aftershave.
I just saw they have OS Signature. Give it a rest.
Ah, but does it smell the same? I used to use a particular brand of soap (Lux or something like that — definitely not “fashion brand” but “staple brand”. I put up with these obsessive and pointless changes of packaging for some years becauase I liked the smell. But then they changed the smell as well and that was it, I’ve never bought another bar since.
Your post was rather nostalgic for me as Old Spice is the brand my dad used when I was a child — I had 3 sisters so he was the only man in the house, and there were these “mysterious” things in the bathroom cabinet like his razor, shaving foam (cake form in those days), shaving brush and a bottle of Old Spice –complete with clipper ship.
I haven’t noticed any change in fragrance. They do have new subvarieties, but I avoid such frivolities.
Here’s a link for those of us who need a visual in this discussion.
Thanks for that. I enjoyed seeing it.
What we need now is a link to one of those old commercials from the 70’s with the sailor back from the sea, the ‘fisherman’ sweater… The original idea (in the commercials) wasn’t that this was a weekend sailor, but that he was a seaman come back from a major (oceanic) voyage.
I loved those commercials. Loved the old jingle too. And that “real sailor” theme was just what I appreciated so much.