Truefitt & Hill 1805 Cologne

A gentleman does not review his barber any more than he reviews his club or his boot-maker though I suppose that has changed in intervening years. My assistant, who has appointed himself the engine of my continuing education in modern commerce, has observed that other readers may not share my familiarity with Truefitt & Hill and that the house has produced a cologne bearing the date of its founding which might, in his view, merit my attention.

Truefitt & Hill holds the distinction of being the oldest barbershop in the world. The establishment was founded in 1805 in Mayfair, during the year of the Battle of Trafalgar, when George III sat on the throne and William Pitt the Younger governed the country. From those fashionable beginnings, serving the particular requirements of London’s gentry at a moment when personal presentation was understood to be a serious occupation, the firm grew into the institution it remains. Its clientele, over the course of nearly two centuries, has included most male members of the British Royal Family since George III, as well as Gladstone, Wellington, Churchill, and, if one ventures further afield, Dickens, Byron, Wilde, Beau Brummell, and, in more recent decades, gentlemen of the stage and screen.

The modern era of the firm as we know it properly began in 1935, when Truefitt acquired the hairdressing business of Edwin S. Hill & Co., and the name was compounded into its present form. From its premises in Burlington Gardens, the shop continues to offer barbering services and to supply shaving requisites, hair preparations, and fragrances of a quality consistent with its reputation.

A visit to one’s barber in my own day was not the exercise in product selection that my assistant seems to imagine it. One did not arrive and choose a signature scent from a curated arrangement of bottles. One sat in the chair. Hot towels were applied, this being the indispensable preliminary that distinguished a proper shave from everything else calling itself by that name, and the beard was softened before the soap was built into lather with the brush. The soap of the period was tallow-based, lightly scented with lavender or rose, occasionally quite plain.

After the straight razor had done its work and the cold towel had completed the close, a hair tonic was applied, bay rum being the most common, that spiced, faintly clove-edged preparation that smelled of colonial enterprise and clean linen, or else a citrus water, or a simple lavender preparation. These were fleeting things. By luncheon, one smelled of wool and the out-of-doors, which is as it should be. The gentleman’s understanding of scent was that it should register at conversation distance and nowhere further, and dissolve within the hour. The idea of a ‘signature fragrance,’ a persistent, projecting statement worn throughout the day as a form of self-advertisement, would have struck us as rather more suited to the theatre than to civilised life.

The 1805 cologne is, as my assistant correctly identified, the scent that comes closest in spirit to what a gentleman of my era would have recognised as appropriate. Its structure follows the classical lines: citrus at the opening, bergamot principally, with mandarin in attendance, giving way to a light, clean middle before settling into a foundation of restrained musk.

I should note, in the interest of full candour, that the formulation is somewhat smoother and more blended than the colognes and waters of my own day would have been. The perfumer’s art has advanced considerably, and the modern tendency is toward coherence and longevity, two qualities that were, in my experience, rather less central to the purpose of a grooming preparation than they have since become.

There is something in the construction of the scent that recalls the clean, spare, barbershop-and-clubland atmosphere that Truefitt has always understood and served. That this impression survives into the present century speaks well of the house.