Cool Water
Davidoff Cool Water Eau de Toilette is one of a handful of fragrances that changed what men's perfumery smelled like, and almost forty years on it is still the reference point for the whole chilled and clean idea.
It opens with a shock of cold. Mint is the first thing you register, sharp and almost icy, with rosemary bringing a dry camphorous bite and coriander a faint peppery greenness behind it, and there is no sweetness anywhere in the first ten minutes. The middle warms things carefully: lavender keeps the clean herbal line going, geranium adds a crisp and slightly green edge, sandalwood brings the first creaminess, and amber supplies a soft resinous warmth that stops the whole thing freezing solid.
Then the base does what almost none of the imitators managed. Musk, oakmoss, cedarwood, tobacco and ambergris together make a finish that is earthy, dry and faintly salty, the tobacco giving a soft leafy warmth and the ambergris a mineral quality that reads as skin. It is the reason the fragrance still holds your interest past the first hour. Pierre Bourdon composed it and it was released in 1988.
Expect five or six hours with a very strong opening and a close finish, and go easy with it, because this projects more than you expect. It works best in warm weather and in daylight, it is marketed to men, and it is as useful at twenty as at sixty.
Davidoff opened in Geneva in 1911 as a tobacconist and became a cigar house under Zino Davidoff, with fragrance run as a separate licensed business. This bottle is what that side of the company is built on, and it has since thrown off flanker after flanker, together with Cool Water Woman in 1996.
Please note: images are a guide only. Packaging and bottle design may occasionally differ from those shown due to manufacturer updates or promotions.
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