The Scents of the Bathroom

My only experience of fragrance for men as a child came in the shape of talc. Sandalwood talc. Even now, I remember the absolute joy of opening a new one, normally from St Michael (I had no idea that there was a link to M&S) and the delicious anticipation of squeezing the slightly-giving metal sides until a mini dust cloud came out.  It's weird to remember the simplicity of a seventies lower-middle class bathroom. They were empty.  Anything gorgeous was reserved for the Dressing Table, an area out-of-bounds for the son of the family.  Again, is that why I love those little bottles of perfume, because they were away from my clumsy hands?

So, what was in the bathroom? Soap, of course. Solid, or the remains of solid soap. I don't remember us having Carbolic Soap, but maybe it was there for garden-induced stains.  I do recall the life-affirming joy of Zest soap, whose lemony-lemonness can never be replicated for me. I remember a Christmas stocking with a bar of Zest in it, probably from 1977, and I was filled with the most heady joy that I owned a soap. A simple pleasure perhaps, but also key to me resenting the underfed citrus hit of CK One nearly two decades later.

Shaving cream. Oh God, if anything else represents the uncomplicated male it is that. Clean, crisp, medicinal and wholly masculine, it is something that I want to smell right now, as a 42 year old urbane man. There was something about it that told you everything would be OK if your Dad was there, shaving bare-chested in the bathroom.

Toothpaste. I love to cook now, but have a terrible habit of adding too many ingredients. I have a feeling this was based on the rapid-fire introduction of colours and flavours into mid-70s toothpastes. How astonishing it seemed at the time, to see three or four colours coming out like a liquid stick of rock onto your toothbrush.  Again, a simple pleasure - but how many pleasures are complicated?

The third, and final item were the bath soaks such as Radox or Matey would appear on Christmas Day and stay, empty and defiant, until they were cleared away in The Spring Clean. But Talc was the mainstay, the only acceptable way of a man fragrancing himself in the seventies, and therefore the only way that I had.

I loved it, but loathed the way it settled into the quickly-perishing rubber foot wells of our ancient bathroom scales. I spent many evenings looking at them with real, burning resentment. My sweet, soft talc, which added so much to my life, became my enemy. It sullied an experience. I knew there was a better way - something clear and pristine that evaporated before it spoiled - but it was only a concept. The reality came years later with my first bottle of fragrance, which is something to discuss in a future entry...

         [by PETER]