Sniffing Out The Brutish Bike Fiend
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday February 27, 1990
YOU might just catch a hint of Tuscany about me at the moment. Tuscany the fragrance, that is, not Tuscany the foppish sense of style.
The big budgets are about again, inciting us to play musical colognes, to reassess who we are and who we want to be ... or at least who we want to smell like and who we want people to think we are. And it's a decision worthy of more than a minute's attention.
The inadvisability of changing horses in mid-stream has nothing on that of changing fragrances in mid-life.
According to the bottlers of the stuff, "fragrance speaks for its wearer, communicating impressions that linger through time". It occurs to me that fragrance could have quite a bit to answer for. A man has to have a lot of faith in a fragrance that goes around talking about him.
Tuscany may well be communicating the totally erroneous impression that I regard myself as one of the new Medicis. In fact, the decision to switch to Tuscany relied totally on the fact that someone who buys a bottle of it is going to win a rather nice bicycle. And this seemed like my best chance to get one.
I make no excuse for the renaissance man deception. It's just that no-one markets a fragrance specially created to convey the impression that here is a man who craves a bicycle.
Tuscany, of course, is a mere whiff in the current bouquet of fad fragrances. Another contender is Salvador Dali, the fragrance for the man who is a contradiction. It is, says the holder of the Salvador Dali eau de toilette pour homme licence, "a venture which echoes the dictum: a little art-business, a little business-art |" Cute, but what about the bike, fellas?
"Surrealism," they tell us, "is based on the belief that there are treasures hidden in the human realm. Dali for Men is inspired by the magic vision of man meeting woman, and myth, dream and legend being united." Crumbs
In more rakish days, I used to trust Aramis to communicate impressions about me ... but even then it was a case of mistaken identity. I figured that, of the Three Musketeers, Aramis always had a bit more swash and buckle than Porthos and Athos. And then I read Estee Lauder's profile of her product
"The Scent of Success," she said, " ... for the man either on his way to, or already at, the top of the corporate ladder." In other words, for the man who already has a BMW rather than for the man who wants a bike.
Until she put me right, I'd been living a pathetic lie - an impostor in the realm of the debonair, decidedly upbeat men with an insatiable sense of style- men who are romantic, men to whom women respond. The response suggested that I'd also got a dud bottle.
There's double trouble lurking out there. Once you've found an image you can live up to, there's still the actual smell of the stuff to come to terms with.
It has never really been successfully explained why the man whose aim is optimum personal freshness, should drench himself in "velvety mosses set in a background accentuated by leather", or for that matter in the essence of celery, thyme, lemon and cardamom. You might just as well wait until you get to the club and pour a Bloody Mary over yourself.
Dali for Men has actually managed to evoke "the universe of man triumphant, by orchestrating woody, warm notes ... a fantasy of the odours of the Mediterranean landscape in the time of Praxiteles".
It had to happen. I was over at the Vaucluse Workingmen's Club the other night, downing a few daiquiris with the boys, when this woman crawled along the bar towards me, penetrated our very universe of man triumphant, and said, "I am answering the call of the odours of the Mediterranean landscape in the time of Praxiteles. You must be a Dali man."
"Sorry, love," I had to tell her. "Tuscany ... I want the bike."
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald