And while nostalgia may sell a couple of cases, there’s so much more competition: every brand and its dog has launched a fragrance. It will be fascinating to see how it does.”And never mind the smell, which remains subjective, if widely imitated. Perhaps more questionable is the suggested method of application. Brut may not have had its day yet, but modern grooming man knows that splashing it on all over is a surefire way to end up evacuating the lift, if not scorching your face.”Brut may be very successful again because of its retro quirkiness,” suggests Sally Penford, the education manager of the International Dermotological Institute, “but as for splashing what is basically fragrance plus alcohol all over, I’d hope men were more educated now ‘Aftershave’ really is an outdated name. It suggests that you should put it on after shaving, but that’s the worst thing you can do: you’ve just taken a layer of skin off and your face is especially sensitive, so you’re most likely to aggravate it Splashing that all over is just going to sting. And that’s not cool at all.”SPLASH IT ON ALL OVER: THE SCENTS OF THE DECADESThe 1970sThe smell: Hai Karate, Brut, Jade East, Denim, and Old SpiceThe role model: “The man who doesn’t try too hard”. It is a classic, the first fragrance every man wanted, and every man could have, doing for men’s fragrances what Charlie had done for women’s.

“It was really the first men’s fragrance that was marketed, that came with tempting packaging, but that was also much less expensive than what had come before Its muskiness was new, making it all about sex. Once the “talent” agrees to come, you have to get them there. As Barry McIlheney, ex-editor/publisher of Q and film title Empire and an awards-show veteran, says: “We have had the most ridiculous ‘riders’ [celeb demands] over the years for our awards shows. One international superstar would apparently only come to the Q Awards if we a) brought him in and took him out through the kitchens to avoid any press, and b) we were totally clear that he would be out of there and gone within one hour of arriving – maximum.

But it was Brut’s arrival, first as a top-end fragrance in 1966, then in its better known, weaker mass-market version seven years later, that broke that mould.”It was revolutionary,” says Roja Dove, a fragrance expert and the man behind the development of bestsellers for the likes of Guerlain, Hugo Boss and Lacoste – who also notes the remarkable similarity between Brut and more recent designer bestsellers. Souter is also hoping to pick up what it is calling “Seventies youth” – those younger men who can remember their fathers making like “our ‘Enry” in front of the shaving mirror.Certainly Brut does have a proud history to emphasise. This was followed by Knize Ten in 1924, then both Dunhill and Karon’s Pour Un Homme in 1934, Guerlain’s Vetiver in 1957 and Revlon’s That Man in 1961 – all upmarket fragrances. Easy though it is, in the designer smellies age, to mock Brut as naffness in a bottle, it was groundbreaking. There had been fragrances for men before: the first, Guerlain’s Mouchoir de Monsieur in 1904 was floral but with a strong undercurrent of musk. According to Souter’s studies, 72 per cent of Brut aftershave users, for instance, are over 45, compared with 49 per cent of all aftershave users – they buy grooming products less often, and spend less than half than average, but when they do they go for “the great smell of Brut”, as the ads once had it.