12/24/17

English Leather Appears To Be Discontinued

Looks like it'll have to be nothing at all.

Just a holiday observation: if you try to find a bottle of English Leather online, you are out of luck. Apparently stock is dried up, and Dana is no longer producing this classic. The bottle prices range from $24 to $120 depending on size, with the 8 oz jug costing about $100, and the 3.4 oz bottles anywhere from $23 to $75. This is sad, and frankly astonishing. EL used to be the easiest to find and cheapest to purchase. Even Dana's site has none available.

I can't believe that a seventy year-old fragrance, originally produced by Javier Serra and successfully sold by MEM until Dana's acquisition about twenty years ago, is suddenly no more. How could Dana drop the ball like that? What went wrong? Clearly this kind of fragrance is no longer popular, but then again neither are Old Spice and Brut, and they're surviving. What's Dana's excuse? They didn't want to bother lifting the brand up out of the dust of the 20th century, and now, instead of having it as a branch to profit from, it no longer exists.

I happen to have an 8 oz bottle of the cologne, which still contains about 7.5 ounces, and I guess I'll be holding on to it for years to come, as I rarely wear it. The color of the liquid has darkened considerably since I bought it, and upon sampling it yesterday, I found its sharp citrus notes and stark woody drydown have mellowed into a closer representation of the vintage scent. Hopefully another company revives the English Leather name, as it would be awful to think this scent is gone for good.