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Look on your bookshelf, in your armoire, wherever you stash your toiletries. We’d bet a shiny buffalo nickel you’ve got one bottle of cologne there, maybe a second collecting dust. The one you’ve got smells like getting socked with a powdery diaper, but the packaging made you think of white sand, bracing saltwater and azure skies. What happened? More to the point, how did you end up with that bottle? For all the energy men expend making decisions about what to buy (we should know), we put comparatively little effort into cologne.
There are good reasons for this. For starters, it seems indulgent to put much effort into anointing ourselves with fragrance, as if we were some aging Roman statesmen with shaved armpits. Second, the actual process of testing cologne is impractical. You’ve got to put it on to know how it jives with your own personal epidermis, but you can only put on one cologne per day, which means testing colognes becomes cumbersome. And yet we still need to find the right one, because there’s nothing like your woman — hell, even a stranger in the grocery check-out line — leaning in and whispering how goddam good you smell. And making that “grrrr” sound?
One way to winnow the selection of colognes should be reviews, but the majority of what’s out there is either industry-focused or heavily skewed toward the big commercial brands. We’re taking some of the guesswork out by testing men’s cologne here at GP, starting with a look at five small-batch colognes from niche brands we like.
YOU SMELL NICE: Hudson Made Beard & Shave Soap | Triumph & Disaster Grooming Products | Penhaligon’s Juniper Sling
Juniper Ridge Wild Plum Campground Backpacker’s Cologne
Best for Lumberjacks and Pitmasters: We’ve covered Juniper Ridge on these pages before. The Berkeley-based company is unique among fragrance producers, mainly because they distill all their own essential oils from wild plants and trees harvested in High Sierra, Cascades and Big Sur, but also because they’re basically backpackers and naturalists who happen to bottle the smells of the West. Their Wild Plum Campground Backpacker’s Cologne ($100) is bizarre stuff: sweet and juicy — plums and grapes — with notes of cedar, pine and resin dripping from freshly torn bark. This one’s basically unrecognizable as a cologne, which is to say it’s radically different from what’s out there. We like it. It smells of a place (Yuba River, in this case). It goes on strong, but it has limited staying power because Juniper Ridge doesn’t use petroleum additives. The perfect cologne to cover up nasty BO.
