Max "Bunny" Sparber

THE RULE OF THUMB, when it comes to men's fragrances, is the following: If you can smell it on yourself, you've used too much.

Ignore that advice. The really entertaining men's toilette items tend to pack a punch, and keep on packing it. Pinaud-Clubman's After Shave Lotion, as an example, can be smelled throughout the room upon opening. Pat some on your cheeks, and you can expect people to notice the smell for the next few days. It's a smell that anyone who has been in an old-school barbershop will recognize -- a citrusy scent with a bite of alcohol. It's the sort of stuff that barbers named Bender have on hand, former military men who learned to cut heads while in the Marines and tend to offer two styles of haircut: too short and combed over. They shave the back of your neck and then out comes the aftershave, and it's not like today's stuff. No, modern aftershaves tend to be soothing lotions filled with healing and moisturizing botanicals, such as aloe vera, and leave modern men smelling like an expensive salad. Instead, these are the aftershaves that are meant as astringents and antiseptics, as though shaving was field surgery. They burn going on, an experience the manufactures cover with tougher-sounding buzzwords, such as "bracing" and "invigorating."

But there's something about these antiquated aftershaves that are irresistible. They stink, yes, but it is a stink of an older time of masculinity, when men smelled like this. I remember the smell from my childhood. It's what my uncles smelled like, who were cranky middle-aged Jewish men with gold rings, who dressed up by wearing black ties over black shirts, who magnanimously paid for movies and dinners out and trips to the zoo with neatly folded wads of bills held in place by a money clip. They smelled like what adulthood smelled like, and doesn't anymore.