Though I say it myself, I think I was a good-looking child. Dark brown eyes, long eyelashes and dark hair. The sort of child middle-aged women would take one look at and immediately want to mother.
Then puberty arrived and ruined everything.
Pimples appeared. Hair started growing on my face and in other places where, up to then, there had been no need for it at all. I began to wonder if evolution had suddenly gone into reverse.
The advice from adults was fairly simple. Wash your face properly and start shaving.
Shaving came as a bit of a shock. Nobody had mentioned that becoming a man involved scraping a sharp blade over your face every morning for the rest of your life. I was introduced to shaving foam and razor blades and pretty soon to the other essential piece of shaving equipment: bits of cotton wool stuck to your chin while you ate your breakfast.
No one warned you about the cuts.
You would nick your chin, put a bit of cotton wool on it, nick somewhere else and add another bit. By the time you finished, you looked as if a swarm of mosquitoes had attacked you.
Still, shaving was apparently a rite of passage.
And then I discovered aftershave.
This was different.
Aftershave wasn’t sold as something to put on your face after shaving. It was sold as something that would make women find you irresistible. That was enough to make you endure the sting when the aftershave hit your shaving nicks.
For a teenage boy, this was extremely important information.
The one I remember most was Old Spice. It came in a white glass bottle with a sailing ship on the front. It looked terribly grown-up. Men who wore Old Spice clearly knew what they were doing.
I wanted some immediately.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford it, so I did what any sensible teenager would do. I stole small quantities of my father’s.
Before going out, I would sneak into the bedroom, take the top off and splash on a few drops. Well, more than a few. The difficulty with aftershave at that age was knowing when to stop.
You didn’t want people thinking, “That’s a nice smell.”
You wanted them thinking, “Good God, who’s that?”
I can now see that teenage girls probably weren’t waiting around hoping for a boy who smelt like their father; in fact, they didn’t want you to smell at all, but this didn’t occur to me at the time.
Anyway, the cosmetics companies knew they had us. Old Spice was becoming old-fashioned, so they rebranded and ran adverts with a very good-looking, ripped Afro-Caribbean man with the slogan ‘The man your man could smell like’. Clearly aimed at women who bought aftershave for their man at Christmas because they couldn’t think of anything else.
But there was big competition now. Like Brut. Henry Cooper (the boxer who nearly knocked out Mohamed Ali) appeared on television telling us to “Splash it all over.”
We took him at his word.
Men were soon splashing Brut on their face, neck, chest and anywhere else they thought might improve their chances.
You could occasionally smell someone wearing Brut before they entered the room.
Then there was Hi Karate.
Hi Karate arrived at exactly the right time, when every teenage boy was watching kung fu films and imagining that he might one day need to fight six men in an alleyway.
The adverts suggested that Hi Karate would make women lose all control and throw themselves at you.
Oddly enough, the man in the advert then had to use karate to fight them off.
This should probably have raised questions about whether buying it was a good idea.
It didn’t.
There were endless new fragrances after that. Bottles with French names. Bottles shaped like things. Men’s perfume counters where somebody sprays a bit onto a strip of cardboard and asks what you think.
I’ve never known what to say.
“Yes. That’s a smell.”
Then Lynx Africa arrived.
Lynx took the old promise of aftershave and really went for it. Spray this on, and women would apparently chase you down the street.
Teenage boys believed every word.
They didn’t so much apply Lynx as fumigate themselves with it.
Even now, if you go near a Debs night, you can usually detect a young man in a new suit wearing enough Lynx Africa to stun wildlife.
You don’t have to see him.
You can smell him coming.
And after all these years, the message hasn’t changed much. There is still the suggestion that somewhere out there is a bottle, spray or fragrance that will make men irresistible.
We really should know better by now.
Wash. Brush your teeth. Wear clean clothes. Don’t behave like an idiot. That probably works better than Old Spice ever did.
But it wouldn’t make much of an advert.
