Pitralon

For real men since 1927

I first encountered Pitralon in one of the earlier editions of the Manufactum catalog circa 2005. In those days, Manufactum was pandering both to the sort of people who hanker for Dualit toasters and to an older generation who had, in Alexandre Adler’s words, “seen the Old World end.” The 1950s and ‘60s saw a mass extinction of small family firms and old trades, the former often making stuff for the latter. When I was a kid, the Bazar de l’Hotel de Ville, nominally a department store among others in the middle of Paris, was the last zoo for endangered species like uniforms for Auvergnat coal merchants (black cotton) and customized Opinel knives with Micarta handles.

In Western Europe, the old BHV and most of the stuff in it was long gone by the time the Web came along. But the planned economy of the Soviet Empire had preserved in aspic all manner of Central European small outfits, and Manufactum brilliantly tapped their nostalgic wares. I remember everything in their catalog being both desirable and pointless in the same way: obsolete materials in designs familiar from childhood memories, e.g., bakelite banker’s lamps and Ruthenian heavy felt smocks (I am making these up).

These days, under new ownership, the Manufactum perfume page is full of trendy stuff, but early on, the men’s grooming section of their site was brief and odd. I seem to remember they had Tabac by Mäurer & Wirtz, Knize Ten, a couple of obscure lavenders, Bay Rum, and one or two pseudo-Victorian steampunk things. And, of course, the mysterious Pitralon, which, for some reason, you could not get anywhere else. I ordered the Pitralon. This is where it gets personal.

Each of us is a windchime tinkling in response to breezes from the past. Let us start with the name. Pitralon, to me, was a name fit for a sedative, the kind that came in tablets enclosed in an aluminum tube with a screwcap, maybe one of those lethal acetylenic alcohols. (My mother once swallowed a tablet of a thing called Oblivon and found she could no longer walk to her bed.) Then came the look: the dark Badedas green, the austere, compressed, sans serif typeface suggestive of a German dentist’s front door plaque, the outsize circle around it reminiscent of pre-WWII storefront decorations.

And the fragrance …. The closest points of comparison, Tabac and Old Spice, both had the same puzzling perfect fragrance joinery, accords so simple and so smooth that they showed no visible seams and could not be pulled apart. But these two were suave, a quality required of Fifties Man, father, provider and all-round Rock of Gibraltar. Pitralon was not your dad. It was the smell of a stranger, maybe the cop who elbows gawkers aside to take a look at the crime scene and rub the blood between thumb and index. It was unsmiling, a poker-faced thing, the smell of a man whose inner soul is reduced to a stick figure.

I found it sufficiently scary not to even store it in the same place as the rest of my collection, for fear it would start asking questions of Narcisse Noir and lead it away in handcuffs. The bottle of Pitralon got lost in our most recent move, and I suddenly felt the need to get some more. I looked up the firm and found that they have, naturally, diversified their range and offer Pitralon Pure, Pitralon Polar, and Pitrell. I wrote asking for a sample, got no answer, and ended up buying 100 ml on eBay for £10. When it came, I worried about it not being the same, and also worried that opening the bottle would let out the same dark genie. In the event, it turned out to be unchanged, a musky citrus fougère, still malevolent, but now older and less menacing because, in the interval, I grew up.