I Bought Another Bottle of 'The Veg'

Someday someone will figure out how to precisely date Pinaud products, sort of like that anonymous guy did with his exhaustively compiled Old Spice site. The bottle shown here was purchased by me on eBay last week, and as you can see, it is almost identical to the one that was shattered a month ago. 

I won't wax on about Lilac Vegetal, or how gorgeous its vintage bottles are, especially its drugstore "coffin" styled bottles, as I've already done that ad nauseam in a few prior posts. I'll merely point out several differences between this "new" bottle and the one I used to reach for when I wanted to smile. First, another look at the deceased bottle, which was several years older in vintage, shown below.

Note the paper band around the neck, and the 1.19 "plus tax" on the sale ribbon. Also note that it says Ed. Pinaud, and does not state the "alcohol contents" percentage. My newest bottle up top lacks the paper neck band, says 1.29 (and doesn't mention tax), says Pinaud instead of Ed. Pinaud, and states the alcohol percentage above the bottle size.

I would have saved the cream bakelite cap from the deceased bottle, except it also broke! Chipped a good chunk right off it, rendering it useless. Had it survived, I would've swapped it onto my new bottle and gotten rid of the bright green plastic cap that Pinaud switched to in later packaging. But the plastic caps have one feature that I do like, which is the "P" embossed on top. My other bottle cap lacked this feature.

Unfortunately my "new" vintage drugstore bottle is inferior to the other bottle in a couple of notable ways. Although still beautiful and in very good condition, the bottle's sides are embossed in a crumbier fashion, lacking the definition and beauty of the former design. You can still read "Insist on the genuine Pinaud," but it's a little more work to make it out. 

"New" Bottle

"Old" Bottle

The same problem applies to the "A La Corbeille Fleurie" logo, which on the "new" bottle is so pathetically vague that they should have just let the glass be. 

"New"

"Old"

With that said, one thing I like better on my latest bottle is the back label, which just looks cleaner and better designed than the older one did. It's so pretty that it could act as the front label without anyone thinking anything of it. 

I'm not sure, but I feel like the older bottle was physically larger than this one. But as always, I lucked out with the actual product inside the bottle, which smells fantastic, actually brighter, fresher, and more lucid than the other bottle, and perhaps even the barbershop bottle, although I wouldn't swear on that. My guess is this bottle dates to the late sixties, early seventies. My previous bottle was fifties/early sixties. No barcode, and no plastic other than the cap, so the one pictured directly above is definitely pre-eighties. 

I keep the barbershop bottle at my girlfriend's place (where it can't be broken) and the drugstore bottle at my house (also where it's unlikely to break). If anyone knows the age of this bottle, or any of my bottles, please hit me up on Fragrantica. 

Bird of Paradise (Avon)

Avon is sort of a mind-warping brand for fragrance enthusiasts. On the one hand, it's a cheap and somewhat gimmicky mail-order concern that is representative of every twentieth century archetypical "consumerism" paradigm imaginable. You want a fragrance? Don't have a lot of cash to spend? Here's the Avon catalog. It has two hundred items for quick order this season, and another two hundred available at the end of the year. Next year another few hundred will roll out, and none of them cost more than eight bucks. Pick a title and it'll show up at your door in a week. That was how Avon worked from 1940 to 2016, which was when Cerberus Capital Management inked an acquisition deal and sent the brand to Latin American countries, where it continues to enjoy success.

On the other hand, Avon is a serious historical oddity of a brand that has released more perfumes than virtually any other company. The casual observer may think it's a cheapo throwaway name, but those who are in-the-know view it as a playground for big-name perfumers, including Olivier Cresp, Harry Frémont, Laurent Le Guernec, Rodrigo Flores-Roux, and Sonia Constant, among others. People of their pedigree consider Avon to be a safe testing ground for unusual ideas, a place where experimentation and freedom of expression can occur without much risk of their careers going up in flames. If you try out a new girly-floral idea that incorporates durian fruit and the result sends people running for the exits, you'll be given a good brief for Dior the next day, because nobody minds if an Avon perfume doesn't sell. Avon has something like three thousand perfumes under its belt. A failure could live in their range for years before they even notice it. 

Things get even more interesting when you look at what was released in the sixties and seventies. Take Bird of Paradise, for instance. Released in 1969, this stuff was a bridge between the patchouli head-shop vibe of the hippy free-love era and the open-collared Stepford/Nixonian decade that followed. It came in a variety of bottles, but its earlier incarnations were clear glass with gold caps that were shaped to fit whatever sculpted image Avon was having fun with that day. The original was a rather pretty peacock, but it also came in a fairly uninteresting rectangular bottle and a smaller "golden thimble" bottle, which is the one I own. How does it smell? It's formal but affecting, a Schiff base derived from methyl anthranilate and an aldehyde, upon which one of history's more opulent drugstore orientals was built. Bergamot, lavender, a hint of pineapple for fruitiness, honey for sweetness, florals and greens, sandalwood (a surprisingly high quality synthetic but not Mysore, contrary to popular belief), and incense. No masterpiece, but nice. You get more than you paid for here, which is how Avon has persevered for over a century. 

Lilac Toilette Water (1812 Apothecary), and the Problem With 'Natural' Lilac Scents

Lately I've been studying William Poucher's approach to reconstructing the living essence of lilac. His formula, "Lilac Bouquet, No. 1194" is a list of twenty-two materials in parts per thousand, and nearly all of them are still available to perfumers today. Terpineol is the key material, noted as "extra rectified" and generously dosed at 120 ppt, yet eclipsed in weight by hydroxy-citronellol (165 ppt), cinnamic alcohol (175 ppt), and phenylethyl alcohol (155 ppt). Hydroxy-citronellol smells of muguet/soapy white floral, cinnamic alcohol of ambery florals, and phyenylethyl alcohol of roses. Terpineol, at any but the most dilute amount, smells piney, bordering on woody-citrus. But in high dilution, terpineol smells of lilac flowers, live on the tree, and works wonders. 

When I consider what a true "lilac water" is, I'm conflicted. Poucher's legendary formula dates back to the turn of the twentieth century, and is considered by many to be a marvel of modern chemistry. His late eighteenth century creation reconstructs the headspace essence of lilac flower using a clever workaround to the age-old problem of attempting to create lilac perfumes, namely that lilacs have no yield. Try gathering bundles of lilac flowers for distillation, and what you'll end up with, after agonizing your way through literally hundreds of pounds of flowers, will be a pocket flask full of something that smells very little like the actual bud. This elusive flower doesn't even afford our noses the luxury of enjoying it cut from the tree; wait an hour after snipping and you'll find that its sweetness has dulled, as if the blooms know they've been killed. 

This makes synthesis an inevitability. Perfumers have little choice but to reconstruct the smell by cobbling various disparate elements into something that closely approximates the living flower. But what did all of those early-to-mid eighteenth century barbers use? What were the cowboys in the 1850s and '60s being offered after a close shave? Lilac waters were in use back then but they predated the clever chemistry experiments of Pinaud and Poucher's era. The average barber wasn't going to pay a fortune for some enfleurage-made lilac perfume, which would only come in sub-fifty milliliter sizes anyway. We know that perfumery advanced when synthetics were discovered and employed, and by the 1870s that process was underway, but the midcentury toilette waters predated much of the scientific molecular revolution. How then did people make do?

It turns out they didn't. In Ashby, Massachusetts, there is a company called 1812 Apothecary, which is a subsidiary concern of the Second Chance Farm Sanctuary, an animal sanctuary that moonlights as a natural perfumery. I happened across their lilac toilette water on Etsy and bought a large bottle. According to their shop, their lilac water is seasonal, and is only available for brief periods in spring. It isn't entirely clear how they make it, but they claim it is "aged six months and of course made with our own farm-grown lilacs." The ingredients list is very short: spirits, lilac, lilac essential oil. It's that last part that raises my eyebrow, because lilac essential oil is very expensive and doesn't really smell like lilacs. And if there's actual lilac flowers in the brew, how were they "aged" to create this product? Steeped in spirits? Or were they actually given an enfleurage treatment? If the latter, this stuff would be a hell of a lot more expensive than it is. 

If the flowers were simply dropped in a vat of spirits and left to sit for months, then the result wouldn't smell anything like lilacs. This is a conundrum, because 1812 Apothecary's lilac water does smell like lilacs. Well, it dries down to the smell of purple lilac, that sweet and unforgettable aroma. But it starts out smelling like a failed natural perfumery experiment, a weirdly dissonant accord of flattened and condensed floral materials that seem to veer slightly into a bizarre zone of cinnamon and tree bark. What I've gleaned from the wearing experience is that the farm-grown lilacs were indeed steeped in spirits for half a year, then filtered into this perfume, and their yield is evocative of being surrounded by flowers that were felled and left in a wet field for a few weeks. Kinda-sorta lilac-floral, but hampered by a borderline-rotten vegetal scent tinged by a lick of geosmin.  

Just when I thought the whole thing was botched, the all-natural lilac burned off and transitioned to what must be the "lilac essential oil." Saying that your fragrance contains the essential oil of something that isn't represented by its EO is strange. It also gives the perfumer plenty of latitude to use a professionally-compounded concentration oil of the sort used by any mainstream or niche perfumery, and simply call it an EO because it sounds more "natural." Whatever the case may be, 1812 Apothecary's Lilac Toilette Water dries down to a truly gorgeous powdery-fresh purple lilac, and is probably the best lilac fragrance I've ever encountered. Whatever they're using, whatever their ace of spades secret formula happens to be, it works. I'm here to tell you, I'm pleased with it. If you're like me, and you're obsessed with lilac, this stuff smells absolutely beautiful. Does it smell exactly like living flower? No, but it clearly isn't trying to, and I like that it doesn't. It smells close, and puts its own spin on the idea by imbuing the floral sweetness with a dry and almost chalky quality. It's like Mary Cassatt's Lilacs in a Window interpreted as perfume. 

My guess is that the people at Second Chance Farm Sanctuary use some sort of IFF-derived (or similar) compounded concentrate, not a million miles away from Poucher's, and they simply dole it out across a limited number of bottles each year. It wouldn't be insanely expensive to buy a convincing semi-synthetic lilac base that also plays well with a quirky all-natural lilac brew, and it would be a smart approach for anyone trying to revive this genre. If they only used the natural stuff, it would be a complete failure, and would smell for hours like the first eight minutes of this product, i.e., nothing like actual lilac. My guess is this part of the fragrance is what those cowboy toilette waters smelled like back in the gunslinger days. Inject a little modern medicine into things, and suddenly you have a minor miracle. If I were them, I would scale back on the naturals and bump up the "essential oil" component. The result would be worth far more than four bucks an ounce. 

Moss (Commodity)

Minimalism is something I've been thinking about for most of my life. The idea of abandoning the complex modern world and living on a desert island in a spartan hut with no extraneous belongings was a childhood fantasy. Just me, a pen full of chickens, a small vegetable garden, a fishing pole, and the open ocean. No concern about a job, or money, or social pressures. Just make my own food and live. Pretty appealing. 

So I understand the philosophical ethic behind a fragrance like Moss  (dubbed "Personal" by the brand), a bleached white bottle containing a scent so simple and spare that Millburn, Coleman, and Nicodemus would surely endorse it. It opens with a faint whiff of citrus, juniper, and some green spice, and rapidly the citrus and juniper coalesce around a piercingly sharp petitgrain that focuses like an arrow on conveying a brisk freshness with just enough oomph! to travel two inches off my body. We're talking barely there, folks. Sneeze and you miss it. Within three hours it's gone. 

Commodity was a little too successful here. While Moss  does smell good, and I enjoy the crisp green notes on offer, everything is a little too wan and washed out to warrant further wears. Why apply something that will be gone before lunch? Heck, before breakfast, even? I'm all for minimalism, but there's a difference between that and scraping by, and with its razor-thin drydown, this one leaves me hanging. 

Hot Water (Davidoff)

Some fragrances are created with a specific purpose in mind, rather like cars. An econobox isn't made to be a race car, but it is made to get you anywhere reliably. I thought of a car when I first tried Davidoff's Hot Water, the long-awaited yang to Cool Water's yin. While the 1988 Bourdon fougère is most certainly a macaw blue BMW M3 (e30) Evolution 2, replete with rear spoiler, sunroof delete, and 11.0:1 compression ratio, the 2009 Hot Water is a relatively meek tenth generation wide-body E140 Corolla sedan in Barcelona red. Sure, it boasts a hip image with its ribbed bottle and ominous blackout badging, but this stuff gets the shakes when you try to push it past 95. Its performance is the opposite of sexy. But it doesn't need to seduce you, it just needs to get you through the workday, and Hot Water performs just fine in the carpool lane. 

Its top is a sweet melange of herbal and woody notes, mostly light artemisia and basil, with hints of pink and black pepper to liven things, but honestly it's the tamest intro to any fragrance in my collection. You could hate this stuff and still be tempted to wear it, just to see what kind of mileage you get. It's that innocuous. Get over the first ten minutes, and Hot Water settles into a droning hum of synthetic styrax, benzoin resin, basil, more basil, and clean musk. This endures for roughly seven hours, after which the whole thing chugs down to a thin whisper of mostly semisweet musk. I find the basil note to be interesting: when I sniff where I sprayed, exhale on it a few times, then inhale deeply, I get a very realistic and natural-smelling basil note. Pull back and breathe normal, and it's simply a dull sweetness, reminiscent of Joop! Homme with none of the power. 

So do I recommend Hot Water? Yes, I do. I do if you're looking for a work scent that will offend nobody and still smell better than whatever anyone else is wearing. It's light, but it's balanced. It's uninteresting, but it's solid. It's not too spicy, not too sweet, not too woody, not too green. It's not too much of anything, yet it captures the feeling of a professional middle-management dad with three kids at home and a wife with frosted hair who spends her days grocery shopping and lunching with girlfriends. Hot Water isn't exciting, but it's dependable, and on the days when you're not sure which way is up, sometimes you need the little things to fly straight. Hot Water flies straight. If you're looking for something that will get you there with zero drama, and you're not an obsessed fraghead who needs a different fragrance for every mood and whim, I would give you this. You won't regift it, and by Labor Day you'll be on your third bottle. 

Hyrax (Zoologist Perfumes)

African stone is also known as hyraceum, the petrified excrement of the hyrax, which is native to sub-Saharan Africa and some regions of the Middle East. It is harvested in the same way geologists sample any stone, with careful tool extraction from massive stratified and fossilized excrement beds called middens, and thus gathering it does not harm the animal. There are some climate freaks who wail about how chipping out the stuff hurts climate science, but this is the most humanely-acquired animalic material in perfumery, bar none. Zoologist's Hyrax contains real hyraceum, and I think I can smell it. (It also contains synthetic civet, which confuses my hyraceum detector.) 

I love this fragrance. From first sniff, I loved it. It hits me with a peppery/rosey opening, accompanied by saffron aldehyde (2,4 Dimethyl-3-cyclohexen-1-carboxaldehyde), which rapidly segues into a gloriously dusky heart accord of rich resins and animalics, including synthetic castoreum and a variety of florals that coalesce into a Laos oud-like base structure of benzoin and styrax. Adjectives to describe it: Golden, Swirling, Epic. It smells like an eighties masculine "powerhouse" fragrance aping Kouros with extremely high quality materials, and manages to emit at long-range for fully fifteen hours with moderate application, dwarfing even its YSL predecessor in strength. Its florals are blended closely with the fetid aspects of the urinous dungs compiled here, and perfumer Sven Pritzkoleit mentions that he incorporated lilac and hyacinth notes to soften the blow. Wow. 

My only critique would be that I would have adjusted the overall balance only slightly to push out more rose and lilac, to make their dance with the musks even more obvious to the nose, but otherwise Hyrax accomplishes the same burnished glow of its designer Reagan-era progenitors. The hyacinth does endure rather prominently and provides a sweet contrast to the umbers, adding a dimensionality that this sort of composition needs to succeed. These days I tend to lean away from wearing things that are this musky, and I'm sure that contemporary society recoils in horror from this sort of thing (only fragheads understand), so Hyrax wouldn't be a full-bottle purchase. But I'm tempted. 

Squid (Zoologist Perfumes)

Céline Barel

Maybe I'm getting old and cranky, but niche perfumers are starting to annoy me. Céline Barel is, by all metrics, a beautiful woman. She's pictured above, a slender brunette with classically beautiful features, the kind of gal that could give men heart palpitations while serving them diner coffee. She can't help being classy, wears haute couture everywhere all the time, and has probably never set foot in a fast food restaurant. What then is she doing belching out something as diabolically morose as Squid by Zoologist?

This fragrance is absolutely disgusting. It opens with a mix of "marine" salty notes laced with pink pepper and something indescribably sweet. Within five minutes it morphs into more salty notes and a distinct odor of burning hair. The burning hair bit proceeds to be the central player, lasting in all its awful glory for no less than four hours, by which point I'm ready to set my own head on fire. Eventually the wretchedness loosens up and separates into its constituents of incense and sweet amber, still with that evil salinity fouling everything, like low tide at a hair salon in Blackpool. 

By the nine hour mark, I've had it. There was little evolution to this terrible fragrance, and all it did was make me wonder why it was made. I guess what bugs me is that it's obvious Céline Barel wouldn't wear it, not even for five minutes. She wouldn't want her significant other to wear it, either. So why the fuck would she think anyone else would want to wear it? I understand how briefs work. I get that Mr. Wong had his reasons for why Squid should smell bad. All she had to do was smile at him a few times and tell him she liked his tie, and this could have all gone another way. 

Royal Violets (Agustín Reyes)

Think Stuart Davis Paintings, bottled.

Agustín W. Reyes III has quite a story. His grandfather started a perfume company on December 6th, 1927, with the launch of Agua de Colonia de Agustín Reyes, followed by Loción Violetas Rusas (Russian Violets). The latter was renamed to Royal Violets after the Reyes family emigrated from Cuba to the United States and reopened the perfumery in Miami. Royal Violets remains the family company's sole survivor, and is currently the only fragrance available. (Reyes told me that he uses the same fragrance formula for every cologne, and simply adds aloe and chamomile to distinguish between formulas.) 

I bought a five-ounce glass bottle of the basic "adult" (non-chamomile) splash cologne, and was pleasantly surprised by how attractive it is. I find the box, bottle label, and textured glass to be very well designed and eye-catching. The product looks and feels like twentieth century iconography, and it's small wonder that it's Cuba's pride and joy. Apparently it is widely used in Cuban culture, often on babies, which I find humorous (baby colognes are inherently hilarious), and a stroll down any street in Miami will yield at least a few whiffs of this stuff. I find it so interesting that Agustín Reyes has not branched out, as many brands are wont to do these days, but they openly admit in their company story that limited resources necessitated the family's laser-like focus on one cologne. 

The ingredients list cites ylang oil as one of the main components, and I can smell it right out of the gate. Ylang smells bright, almost citrusy, very sweet, and quite heady, a rather narcotic floral material usually favored in tropical bouquets. Here it merely introduces a coumarinic amber that segues into a low concentration violet leaf accord. It provides the perfect base for stuff like Geoffrey Beene's Grey Flannel and Jacomo's Silences. To me, Royal Violets smells like the sweet coumarin heart of Grey Flannel without the green embellishments, like someone extracted Beene's floral sweetness and made it its own scent. I suggest pairing this with violet-themed stuff like the aforementioned, as it lacks the longevity to serve on its own, but I appreciate it as a simple after-shower splash as well. Nice stuff, and shocking that it isn't more widely known outside of Miami.  

Tobacco Vanille (Tom Ford)

Photo by Makia Minich

I've always struggled to understand the appeal of sweetly-flavored tobacco (super cheap "pipe tobacco") fragrances. My brain interprets the cloying sweetness of gas station tobacco as a crassly cheap, artificial construct, a difficult association to erase. It's no different for a downmarket cologne like Pinaud's Citrus Musk, which ostensibly smells of lemongrass but is also reminiscent of a citrus-flavored soda, like 7 Up or Sprite. When a fragrance smells like a flavor, it usually doesn't bode well. 

Tobacco Vanille (2007) is a luxury remake of L'Occitane's Eau des Baux (2006). Tom Ford opted to simplify the composition by clipping the number of notes down to three and calibrating them into smelling as divine as possible, which I think was at least a good try. Where Eau des Baux attempts complexity with cypress and pink pepper, Tobacco Vanille opts for the stark beauty of Dutch pipe tobacco with a silvery edge of cool musk, which strangely lifts the dankness of fire cured leaf into a sharper, greener place. This musk note eventually segues into vanilla and wraps itself around the tobacco like a mother swaddling her young. Its increasingly vanillic sweetness stops just shy of being overbearing by virtue of balance; TV is nothing if not fine-tuned. 

It's also Mephistophelian in strength: a few sprays and I can still smell it on my shirt a week later. This is where it succumbs to the same fate as EdB; a fragrance this powerfully aromtic doesn't really feel like it should be on my body. It feels like a room spray, or perhaps a candle. Yes, it uses good materials, and it's absolutely an appealing option for anyone who enjoys a good flavored tobacco scent, but I need something with a little more complexity and contrast if I'm going to have it on my person for the whole day. Tobacco Vanille would work fine in the morning, but by lunch I'd be ready for something else. 

From a Once-In-a-Lifetime Bottle to a Once-In-a-Lifetime Buying Opportunity: My "Like New" Vintage Pinaud Lilac Vegetal

It's all good now.

It's true: my midcentury drugstore bottle of Lilac Vegetal bit the dust. However, I also stumbled upon a situation on eBay that allowed me to purchase a pristine vintage barbershop replacement bottle for under fifty bucks at auction, and without a single opposing bid. I think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity.

To recap, my original vintage bottle was perched precariously on a bathroom shelf, and the inevitable happened. I don't blame anyone but myself. I accepted that shelf location without argument, knowing that it was likely a terrible place for something so rare, and then had to live with the consequences of my neglect. To be sure, I should never have let it leave my house. Some things are better left in one place. That's history now, and what transpired afterward is fascinating because it's also something I'll never see again.

My first thought upon hearing that my original bottle had been smashed was, "Okay, it's just a glass bottle of something; stuff like that happens." My second thought, kind of a delayed reaction, was "Wait, that's not just any glass bottle. How the hell am I going to replace it?" It wasn't all that difficult, but only because fate smiled upon me. As soon as clean-up was complete, I hopped on eBay and typed in Vintage Pinaud.

The initial results were pretty abysmal. There were several twelve ounce bottles in varying stages of decay, most of them looking pretty rough with missing caps, worn-out labels, and filthy insides. But then I scrolled down to two back-to-back auction listings for what appeared to be the exact same late seventies barbershop bottle. I can't be sure of the exact date, but judging from the green cap and label style, it appears to be roughly from the era when the movie "The Jerk" came out. 

Unlike my previous bottle, which looked to be a Walgreens item from the early 1960s, this one was "for professional use only," denoting its class as an official wholesale barbershop product. I happen to like this style, still in use, still with the same label design, except back then the bottle was a bit larger, heftier, and solid glass. It turns out the seventies formula for the product was also significantly different from the current stuff, and smells almost exactly like my other vintage, with perhaps just a little more of a raw-green "vegetal" edge, which nudges it only slightly closer to how the current stuff smells. 

So I'm on eBay, and I see this bottle with a starting price of $45. Then I see an identical post next to it for what looks like the same bottle, price, and seller. I message the seller and ask him if he has two identical bottles, or if he just posted the same item twice. He tells me he has two bottles, but doesn't send a verification photo. I ask him for one, and he sends me this, after which I spend five minutes rubbing my eyes in disbelief:

I take a look, and my mind is blown. I've never seen two identical barbershop vintages of The Veg with zero differences and in pristine condition. The only slight difference I could spot was that the liquid on the left was a little darker than the one on the right (which is the one I got). I apologized for doubting him. He told me, "No problem." This was clearly going to be a unique buying opportunity.

The facts were clear: I had to maneuver for one of these bottles with no competition from anyone else, and this would probably happen because there were two identical bottles at the same price. I immediately posted my max bid at $200, with eight days until the auction ended. A few days later, I upped my bid to $300. I didn't touch the other bottle. I sat back and waited. Unless the seller reneged on the auction sale, I knew the bottle was mine, and I didn't even have to think about it. 

The seller made one crucial error: he posted photos of the same exact bottle in both listings. Had he posted the genuine bottle, buyers would have spotted the very minor differences between them, particularly the little smudge on the glass of the bottle on the right, and they would have known that the seller was legit (i.e., not scammy). But with two postings of the same bottle, and one of them requiring a max bid higher than $300, the whole thing suddenly looked super sketchy. Few would want to venture into that void.

There was also the fact that if other buyers messaged the seller, they would get the same photo that he sent me. They would then figure that if eBay wants a max bid of over three hundred for one bottle when the other one hasn't been bid on at all, the one with no bids is their best shot. The path of least resistance was bottle #2. The auction closed on day eight. I was the only bidder on the first bottle, and I won the auction at $45. (The second bottle sold for the same amount the next day.)

It's hard to overstate how beautiful this bottle is. It doesn't have the back label of the drugstore bottle, with its funny and whimsical marketing copy, but it was kept in clean condition, out of sunlight, and smells fresh. The red Pinaud stamp that says "A Basket of Flowers" is as clear as day (and quite large), the embossing of "Pinaud, Paris, New York, London" is not worn down on the back, and most importantly the "Lilas de France" slogan is crystal clear in brightly silkscreened color on the front. Absolutely magnificent. The bottle arrived with about ten ounces in it, and although it was previously opened and used, it was not tampered with, and smells perfect. 

Lilac Vegetal was released in 1878 in New York City, according to David Woolf, executive vice president of American International Industries, which manufactured the Pinaud line in the 1990s. The fragrance was sold to barbershops and athletic clubs throughout the twentieth century, and survives today. I find it funny to think of myself retiring into a sedate life of golfing and country club brunches, only to find this big glass bottle of Lilac Vegetal by the sink in the men's lavatory. It appears as one of several common masculine colognes lined up by the mirror in the bathroom of the fancy restaurant that Ferris Bueller crashes in the hit John Hughes movie. Vintage smells different from the current stuff - powdery, soft, a little sweet - and I think every wetshaver owes it to himself to find a bottle. 

I want to close on this note: Pinaud, unlike every other fragrance brand out there, is special. It changes at a snail's pace. Up until only a few years ago, Clubman aftershave was still being made with real oakmoss. The other day I picked up a bottle from CVS and noticed it no longer contained oakmoss. It no longer contains any moss, not even treemoss. I'll be reviewing the new "moss-less" formula soon. It took Pinaud an extra twenty years to bend to IFRA regs on that. While most brands were stripping moss out of their formulas in the 2000s, Pinaud kept it in. Clubman Musk still has it, as far as I know, but then again I bought my bottle several years ago. 

My point is, Pinaud is the last of the Mohicans. Even with IFRA compliance, they still make a nineteenth century Lilac Water, and from how it smells, it seems like they reverted the formula back to something from that time period. They still make Eau de Quinine. Think about that. In 2024, there's a company that sells a product that smells like a colonial quinine tonic. They even still make Eau de Portugal. Pinaud is probably of greater value than any other brand I own. If you're reading this, you have one direction. Get a Pinaud and value it highly, because it is a national treasure. 

How to Value Vintage ED. Pinaud Aftershave Products (And Why I Prize Them More than Anything)

One of a Kind

There was an accident in the bathroom the other day (not that kind, no toilet paper needed), and my vintage Lilac Vegetal, which was three-quarters full, was shattered on the tile floor. My immediate thought upon hearing that this had happened was that it was no different than if someone had dropped a common drinking glass on the floor, as it was simply a glass object containing a lot of fluid. But it also occurred to me that the passing of this particular glass object posed a larger problem: replacement.

If you're a member of Badger & Blade, or just a guy who collects fragrances, you know what it means for something like this to happen. I considered myself lucky to have found an unopened midcentury bottle of Lilac Vegetal, and to be the first (and I hoped only) person to open it and use it. I still believe I'm lucky to have had it in my possession, and to have worn several ounces of its contents. But when I considered the ramifications of its being broken, I realized that the odds of my ever finding another bottle of that quality again were exceedingly slim. Sure, there are other vintages of Lilac Vegetal out there, and yes, some of them are quality specimens and deserving of buyer reverence. But chances are I will never find another new vintage of untouched midcentury stock again. That was a once-in-a-lifetime deal, and even the luckiest are not that lucky again. 

With that said, what's done is done, and I can't resurrect the bottle, so there's no point in crying over spilled Veg. The task now is to find another vintage of comparable value, and to take no prisoners in securing it. I scanned the various merchant sites for items, and found only one of comparable quality, a barbershop bottle from the late seventies or early eighties, with label in good condition and, most importantly, the phrase "Lilas de France" clear and unsullied. For some reason many vintages that pop up online seem to have excessive fading and/or tearing on that part of the label, so finding a bottle with it looking close to new is exciting. The image of this particular item is below:

This is a different kind of Pinaud bottle than the one I lost. The bottle I purchased in 2020 was for general public use, and was easily found in drugstores. The bottle above was sold wholesale to barbers for exclusive use in their shops, and thus was designed with the "long neck" for an easy grab. The peril of owning any of these bottles is that they're made of glass, and it's an antiquated type of glass that fractures into a bajillion pieces, so keeping them secure is important. I view the above specimen as being of a different caliber than my former bottle; Pinaud's "professonal use" bottles are collectible not just because they're vintage, but because they weren't available to the public, and thus are sought after by those seeking vintage barbershop-specific collectibles. 

I paid about $84 for my former bottle after winning it at auction, which of course came down to the last split second. It was a tight bidding war with two other eBay members, one of whom dropped out a little early and left the other to spar with me up past the sixty-dollar range. Time and date matter with vintage Pinaud. In 2020 there were a few more readily available items on eBay, and it wasn't uncommon to see at least three good vintage specimens every week ("good" being defined as any aftershave or cologne housed in glass). Thus finding the "new old stock" Veg was exciting but not surprising. I found it gratifying to win the auction, but was also of the mind that a similar bottle would appear again, and indeed at least one has in the time since. 

This is no longer the lens through which to view vintage Pinaud products. There is increased scarcity in 2024, as several more years have passed and supplies have thinned. As with any vintage fragrance, Pinaud vintages have been winnowed by time until scantly anything but the unaffordable are left. Take for example the Eau de Quinine tonics on eBay this season: None of these are reasonably priced, except for one bottle that was priced under one hundred dollars because someone was stupid enough to write "$5.00" on the label in black magic marker. There is a large bottle of the tonic priced at $1K, which is exorbitant at any size. There is a four-ounce bottle priced at one hundred dollars, which is a bit high, but the point is that Eau de Quinine in shampoo and tonic form is one of the most expensive due to its having been mentioned in a James Bond novel, so a bottle of either form of this scent at or over 100 ml. is reasonable for between eighty and three hundred dollars. (If I were into it, I would pay the max price without a second thought.) 

There are four things I look for in vintage Pinauds, and all four must be present for me to see value in owning them. The first is the bottle must be glass. The second is the labels must be in at least good condition with the name of the fragrance and any marketing slogans legible. The third is the interior of the bottle must be clean, i.e., free of black sludge, dried detritus, or evidence of secondhand abuse. The fourth is the cap must be included, preferably the Bakelite/plastic version (the metal caps give me the willies, as I'm never sure if lead was alloyed into them). Because glass is key, I attend to any of the older formulas in glass, and am always on the market for things like the discontinued Naturelle Sec (I would pay over one hundred dollars for a bottle), Lime Sec, Citrus Musk, if they made it (I've never seen a vintage bottle), the original Clubman in glass, and any of its flankers, and the coveted Bay Rum, as well as Lilac Vegetal. Any of these in a size larger than 1.5 ounces commands top dollar from me, and I would gladly pay it.

I prize these so highly because they're never coming back. Due to market pressures, Pinaud switched from glass to plastic sometime in the late nineties or early 2000s, and in doing so have been saving a fortune on both shipping and collateral costs (everything cheaper because lighter; no broken bottles). It would be an incredible thing if Pinaud ever offered the glass bottles for a limited time, and if they did I would probably buy them up outright for resale value alone. But I doubt they will bother. As it stands, the glass bottles are becoming a rarity, with fewer and fewer appearing in decent condition, and those that have intact labels and original contents have become nearly impossible to source. Given that I paid almost $85 for my bottle in 2020, that is the baseline value that anyone should be paying for a similar bottle today, and I think if you locate something better than what is pictured at top, you ought to be prepared to pay at least twice what I did. Once in a lifetime opportunities are exactly that, and no small amount should be asked.