Dry Down Solo #2: Cool Water (HF)

It was a Friday afternoon. I remember us, my newly-minted first real group of friends and I, having left our eighth-grade school day early. Maybe it’s just that, compared to a normal adult American workday, school gets out very early, early enough on a Friday in late May to feel like a backward echo of what summer Fridays would feel like in New York when I first moved here and discovered them. I’ve never actually had summer Fridays myself - with the exception of one year at an office job, I’ve always worked freelance, from retail jobs to tutoring to writing, but maybe it was the very fact that they belonged to someone else that made summer Fridays seem so enticing. On Friday afternoons in New York between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Friday felt like the same complete emotion it is for a kid set free from school for two whole days. We were briefly collectively pardoned from the dour march of capitalism and lifted into the wide-eyed cadence of tourism. We ordered more drinks than we should, rolled up our shirtsleeves, tilted our necks far back to look up at the how the angles of buildings left the ground and ascended the heavens. We sat outside or in the public-living-room spaces somewhere between outside and inside and watched the afternoon turn a long blue. The day felt like clean water in a glass, open and unweighted, like it was set outside of the grind of ongoing time. 

Davidoff’s Cool Water in its original formulation smells like summer Fridays. But it also smells like a particular Friday afternoon in May in California, when I was thirteen years old, when I went on a date with a boy for the first time. This is embarrassing; Cool Water is embarrassing. It’s an embarrassing thing to buy in a mall, today, in its current formulation, and it’s an embarrassing thing to order off eBay, to get the astoundingly still affordable and still alchemically perfect original version, in the bottles with the old cursive font. If you were dating someone and saw they had a bottle of Cool Water in their apartment it would be embarrassing for both of you. But they’d probably smell great. 

Anyway, my friends and I had gone over to one of their houses to get ready to go to a school dance. It was the sort of extremely basic, suburban, teenage ritual that kids doing it can’t possibly realize is also a massive luxury. Imagine all the things that have to have worked out right in your life, and in the lives of the people responsible for you, in order to have one single perfectly worry-free afternoon. But I felt happy that afternoon in a way that was totally uncharacteristic for how much I took everything for granted at that age. I don’t remember why; I don’t think there was a reason. I do remember that I felt actively lucky for once in my life, the way I should have felt every day. Realistically, it was probably just because I had a crush on a boy whom I was pretty sure also had a crush on me. We were up in the hills in Sausalito somewhere, across the water from San Francisco, at a house with a long sloping lawn and purple flowers planted among smooth flat rocks. It’s strange to think that I remember that afternoon so perfectly when there are so many other afternoons and days and evenings, classrooms and insults and friendships and compliments and conversations, all kinds of things that matter more, that I don’t remember at all. But I remember it because of Cool Water, because every time since that I have smelled Cool Water, I have been brought back to that afternoon.

The boy I was sort-of-but-no-one-was-saying-it-officially on a date with was wearing Cool Water. The boys in our group were talking about what colognes they were wearing, trying to be older than they were, trying to know things, trying to count as real people, but mostly making an excuse for the girls in the group to lean in close to smell them. I leaned in and smelled Cool Water -- its sharp aquatic green opening made fresher and more welcoming by a gentle lavender note - and realized for the first time that I was attracted to someone, in the pit-of-the-stomach, unthinking, illogical way that attraction works when it works, the way it would work for the rest of my life whenever it took over from better, calmer, smarter impulses.

Cool Water was launched in 1988 by Davidoff, a Swiss luxury brand that also makes watches and leather goods and cognac and cufflinks. Davidoff was founded in 1980, but it was Cool Water that put them on the map; the product is still their cornerstone and their workhorse. It was one of the first aquatic fragrances for men, and launched a thousand - if not more - imitators. Today, aquatic fragrances for men seem so obvious as to be cliched, standing in for the whole idea of scent marketed to men, but at the time this was shockingly new. The fresh-but-not-antiseptic way it smelled, an alternative to citrus-based fresh scents or heavy musks like Drakkar Noir, was a whole new language, and brought a whole generation of men to wearing fragrance who might otherwise not have done so. 

Its explosive popularity and genuine stylishness in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s meant that by the early 2000s, boys in eighth grade were wearing it to school dances. It didn’t smell any different (yet), still a bracingly green aquatic shot through with the crisp sophisticated comforts of lavender, settling down into jasmine and sandalwood heart-notes (which always smelled to me like the garden of a huge, clean, welcoming house) and eventually moving through its long and persistent dry down to a base of cedar and amber and musk. All of this still manages to smell clean, but without ever smelling like it is scared of bodies. By the year 2000, Cool Water was so well-known that a teenage boy could pick it up at the mall (it has never been expensive, which is part of how it became so culturally omnipresent) or from his dad or older brother’s dresser or bathroom. The joke about teen boys wearing way too much cologne (it’s not always cologne, but this stereotype is true) on first dates and in the clogged, airless hallways of high schools where the last thing anyone needs is a glug of musk and sandalwood bricking up the air, is an accurate joke. Scent is one way to enter an adult world, and many of us try wearing it before we know what it is, why we should wear it, what it should smell like, or how much of it is appropriate to put on. It’s hard to get to the correct version of an experience any way other than through awkwardness, than by first doing it wrong. Lots of people - not just teenagers, but people of any age - go through life wearing perfumes or performing other beauty rituals with no idea why they should do so other than that it seems to be what people do, and we want to count as people, don’t we?

If you think Cool Water is bad, which is relatively likely, it’s probably because you associate it with teenage boys wearing way too much of it. It also might be because you’ve only smelled the reformulation, which is not terrible but lacks the weird, minor-key magic of the old version. Internet scent forums such as Basenotes and Fragrantica become wonderfully hilarious if you search out the threads on Cool Water. You will instantly find yourself in something like a finance bro strategy meeting that has collapsed into a weepy poetry recital. Men performing a certain kind of I-still-think-Entourage-is-aspirational masculinity also express nigh-on operatic emotion over the changes in the new Cool Water. “We lost a great one, boys,” reads the final line of one post after several hefty paragraphs analyzing the reformulation, eulogizing it as though the scent had been a comrade in a war. The reformulation is, in my opinion, not as awful as all that. What most of the comments in these forums are right about, however, is that 90% of its staying power has been lost in the new version, and that the weirder, funkier parts, the soothing notes that cut all the antiseptic out of the freshness, have been excised or dulled. It’s not a bad fragrance, it’s simply no longer an interesting one. The original formulation, however, is easy to find on eBay, and still quite affordable - look for the bottles with the name in cursive font. 

People assume Cool Water is bad because they also assume that it smells like the men in the forums described above, all congregated sweatily in a room. It doesn’t, actually. (Green Irish Tweed does, though, as does Dolce and Gabbana’s Light Blue). Cool Water isn’t actually a bro-y scent, and works, I think, on just about anyone. But here’s where I have to admit any objectivity I might have breaks down. Cool Water smells heart-poundingly masculine to me because it smells like one of the first genuine moments of attraction to a man I ever experienced, on that gentle California Friday afternoon. Canonical Man Perfumes like Cool Water easily become jokes in the same way heterosexuality is kind of a joke and being attracted to men is a kind of a joke, an objectively ridiculous, inelegant, unsafe, poorly considered thing to do. And yet, I keep doing it anyway - none of the foolishness, the embarrassment, the inelegance, none of the mostly accurate jokes about how men are trash, how straight men are idiots, how heterosexuality is a self-own, has made the horrifying otherness of men, and the sudden fact and focus of desire when it’s fixed on me by someone who smells right, any less capable of shrinking my whole world to the size of the space between someone’s neck and their shoulder. Cool Water, even just when someone walks by on the street wearing it, is for me a reminder of how desire is forever irrational, a way to be a stranger to oneself, a way into the unknown. I still can’t smell Cool Water without being thrust back into that jasmine and ocean-aired afternoon, into that sense that all the colors had filled in, that I had emerged visible for the first time in my life, that bodies for once mattered, were more than an inconvenience.

It is crucial to note that my first boyfriend, this first person on whom I smelled Cool Water, was not traditionally attractive. He was a sloppy, funny, smart slacker kid, and for years everyone had been telling us to date simply because we were the two tallest kids in our grade. At thirteen his face had not yet located lines or definition; whomever he was going to look like had not yet emerged. He definitely did not look anything like the models in the Cool Water ads of that era, or any era. Big name perfumes are often advertised with an idealized person in mind; they mean to offer the false promise that smelling like this will make people think you look like that. But perfume’s whole point, or part of it, is that attraction is not really about what people look like. For years I have used “they smell right” as a shorthand for saying that the irreplaceable, un-fake-able chemical attraction was there with someone. I know a lot of other people who use this, or some version of it, too. Smell links us to the part of ourselves and our desires that we did not invent and cannot control, the part that overtakes us, that makes us unknown to ourselves. And what a relief sometimes, to not choose, to not know what is coming, what we will want, what will work and not work, to not be able to guess who smells right. What a horror, but what a relief, too. 

Cool Water will probably smell great on you, but it might not. It will probably smell like summer, if you let it, but it might also smell like that room full of bros. What I can tell you is that Cool Water smells, to me, like an early experience of mutual desire that felt as free, as weightless, as much an unlooked-for gift, as a summer Friday. To me it smells like being let out of work with nothing pressing to do, walking into a careless afternoon city. It smells fresh without smelling combative, like slow-moving time, watery drinks, and the breezes that cut through humidity, a few hours lifted out of the nervous attention-begging register of the workweek. My first experience of mutual attraction felt like that, for a few hours on a Friday in May in California, and Cool Water smelled and still smells like that, too, the relief of the rare equal balance of wanting and being wanted like getting to stand still for once. But even if it carries no memories for you at all, I recommend this scent with my whole heart; it’s cheap and it lasts and it smells like getting out of school or work early on a Friday afternoon in summer, like the ease of getting something without having to strive for it. 

-HF