Cool Water

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: CW is the EDT version of GIT. It isn’t simpler than GIT, it’s more complex. It doesn’t contain less Ambroxan, it contains more. And it’s not an aquatic at all. It’s very green and terrestrial but where GIT leans into rich iris and sandalwood, CW veers into a neroli, lavender, tobacco, and green apple with hints of peppermint and white musk, before everything settles into a salty amber. GIT smells like rolling hills of verdant wild fields; CW smells like the same landscape but overlooking an Atlantic beach with drier garrigue in the mix and that unmistakably salinated marine air rustling through the growth. And I’d be remiss not to mention that CW shares the marine aspect with GIT, which also has a much subtler salty undercurrent. Of the two fragrances, CW is my favorite and also Pierre Bourdon’s. He has bottles of Cool Water on his desk as I’m typing this. Don’t believe it? Check him out on YouTube. There’s a short piece about him in which he sits at his desk smelling his bottle of CW. It’s his masterpiece and it took him decades to refine the GIT idea into “Davidoff 3.” Consider that next time you want to call it shower gel.

Picked up a small bottle of this today at Burlington for nostalgia's sake as I used to wear this in junior high in the late 90s and loved it. Not sure if it's the reformulation or my memory but it doesnt quite smell the same as I recall. It's much greener and less aquatic that I seem to remember it being when I was younger. That said, it's still a nice trip down memory lane. GIT is one of my favorites and I mainly picked this up because I knew it was by the same guy and wanted to compare them and definitely smell the similarities. Tres Nuit is my, around the house, after shower scent which, to me, dries down almost exactly the same as GIT but was disappointed that it didn't have the super fresh cut grass smell of the OG. I feel like layering Tres Nuit and Cool Water will now give me that green opening and the familiar drydown of GIT since the Cool Water only seems to last about an hour for me.

Davidoff Cool Water instantly carries me back to summers when life felt endless, cassette tapes ruled the dashboard, and every weekend promised another adventure. Its crisp ocean breeze, lavender, mint, and clean woods still smell as fresh today as they did decades ago. Wearing it isn't just about fragrance; it's about revisiting a time when confidence came naturally and the future seemed wide open. While countless scents have come and gone, Cool Water remains timeless, comforting, and unmistakably familiar. Every spray feels like opening an old photo album, reminding me that some memories never fade—they simply smell like home.

Found a small bottle for cheap and sprayed it on my wrist to test it and I loved the smell. The opening kind of reminds me of one of those black ice air fresheners and as it dries down it becomes sort of like an Irish Spring soap or body wash smell. Scent profile is wonderful and I can see why this fragrance remains popular after almost 40 years. However, it does turn into a skin scent rather quickly. Wish there was an EDP or parfum of the same scent profile, I know the other Cool Water flankers divert from the original profile. But this is something you could wear for almost any occasion and it fits right in!

Growing up, I remember watching movies where the villains would occasionally say something along the lines of, “You smell like cheap cologne.” I always wondered what that actually meant. As I've gotten older, I've smelled hundreds of fragrances ranging from $20 to $1,000, and I've never really understood what “cheap cologne” was supposed to smell like. I've smelled bad fragrances, sharp fragrances, overly synthetic fragrances, and poorly blended fragrances, but never one that made me think, “This smells cheap.”