A bloke’s guide to aftershave

In 2020, the year of coronavirus, I came to a fork in the road. I’d just turned 50, a moment of looking back over your life, realising what you’ve failed to achieve, and accepting there’s only a finite number of years left to you. It was clearly a time for making a change of some sort, something fundamental and radical, and I duly made one. I faced reality, took myself in hand, and decided to switch to a new aftershave. 

Until then, it had been Dunhill Edition all the way. Launched in 1984, it had caught me in my mid-teens, was my first taste of adult sophistication (Jeremy Irons wore it!) and it hadn’t really occurred to me in the intervening decades to wear anything else. Indeed, for a man to pay too much attention to such things seemed – and still does – slightly infra dig. 

Yet in the year of my half century I became obsessed – and I mean obsessed – with finding a good replacement, and soon I was haunting the perfume-halls of large stores and spraying so many liquids onto so many strips of card it was getting embarrassing.