British Sterling (1965)
by Dana (orig. by Mem Company)

I had the misfortune of trying this at my local drugstore. The citrus and floral bravado is not bad, but it dries down to a dirty, urine-like leather and then vanishes within a half hour.

I love this one, but my wife loves it even more. this is the one she buys for me, and if she likes it, I'm happy :-)

For a while in the late sixties this was my idea of class. Of course, by comparison with what I had been wearing, I wasn’t too far wrong. I believe that I began using British Sterling after an understandingly abortive attempt at wearing Hai Karate. Believe me, British Sterling was a great improvement over HK. Testing BS again I find it a bit better than I remember. The opening floral and citrus is a pleasant accord – more florals than I would have been comfortable with back then, but I can handle it now. When the fragrance moves to the middle level, it picks up its strong metallic vibration thanks to the clove / cedar combination. I recall it as being more metallic than I perceive now; I still find it too sharp, but not as sharp as my memory had expected. The base is rather dry. It claims amber but I can’t find a strong amber presence. As in many men’s fragrances at the time, it has a fairly dominant generic musk note – not a sweet musk – more powdery than sweet. I don’t get a strong wood accord from the base, probably because the base notes simply do not last very long. The metallic clove and cedar from the middle and the powdery musk from the base hang on as a skin scent for an hour or two. Possibly the fragrance has been reformulated, or my olfactory abilities have lessened, but I found in this reintroduction to British Sterling, that I don’t dislike it as I had expected to; however, I’m not going to take up wearing it again.

You wake up one morning, and while searching for your Blackberry, you notice in the mirror that you have zits!Zits! And not only that, it's not your house or apartment, no....you are home again, a teenager, and yes, Dad is in the bathroom going at it with his electric razor. No more Art of Shaving for you, or Serge Lutens, you creep into the bathroom, and there's only one bottle on the shelf, and that is an opaque bottle of British Sterling, and the whole room smells like the citrus and male hormones- - a room full of high school boys, and you pray that you will wake up, but no, no, not yet... Everything smells like British Sterling, and Your Dad... your Dad is not your Dad, has become Rod Serling......and you are in the twilight zone (fade to creepy Twilight Zone musical crash noise)

I like the admirable Lamp-Lad's graphic and accurate comparison of British Sterling with "old pitted English pewter" in the review below. There is an aroma of the musty old English stately home and the impoverished aristocracy about this scent. It has a sort of stale aura of decaying tradition about it. The Duke being mistaken for the gardener, perhaps, metal polish and gun oil on the dining room table, an old riding boot rotting away in the overgrown herb garden, the faintly mildewed smell of the disused ballroom.
While I find its smell fairly intriguing, it seems to fade fairly quickly.

Hell, this one's not even silverplate. Should have been named "Old Pitted English Pewter With High Lead Content."