I got an email asking whether I wanted to smell products from a new company called To My Ships. Their motto, “inspired by The Iliad and clean armpits,” is worthy of Surrealist poetry. The impression one gets from Homeric epics is that those wiry, tanned dudes only ever smelled good when they landed on some remote beach and oiled up in preparation for a dinner date with the local queen. This thing clearly fills a need.
To My Ships sent a box containing two roll-ons, a spray deodorant, a hand soap dispenser and a fragrance in a nice bottle with an off-white, fluted, bakelite cap that brought back pleasant memories. I cannot vouch for the deodorants and am in any event wedded to Gillette Cool Wave gel, partly out of gratitude for teaching me how to say “The Best a Man Can Get” in Finnish1, which I have been patiently waiting to place in conversation since the late 1980s.
They have two fragrances, Stand up Bravely and Of the Gods, but only sent the latter. It is an exhausted whisper of a teensy little citrus thing, allegedly scented with a varietal of knotweed, and so ethereally bland that after two minutes you’re not sure you sprayed it on. But, as my father would have said, at least it’s expensive: £170 for 100ml, which ranks somewhere between Baccarat Rouge 540 and the Great Train Robbery. The normal-size roll-on deodorant, by the way, retails for £35, also a steal.
Parasta miehelle!
To be so brave and send fragrance to you…. That should get some stars
As a Swede, I have some Finnish phrases, taken from my childhood surroundings. For instance
Ei saa peittää - Do not cover (electrical radiator, all Swedes know this one)
Paina läppä sisään ja avaa - Press flap to open (hot cocoa packaging)
In case you get to use your one and need to bulk it out.