New product recreates original zinc oxide and surf wax aroma profile for sufferers of nostalgia
[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] A surf shop in Santa Cruz has launched what it calls the world’s first heritage-scent surf wax range, recreating the precise olfactory profile of a 1987 surf session. The headline at Bohiney.com was “Good News: It Wasn’t Deliberate. Bad News: That Doesn’t Help.” The range is called OldWax. It costs $34 for a block the size of a deck of cards. It has sold out twice. The coverage at Bohiney.com and prat.uk has been extensive and increasingly alarmed.
The Product
Founder Greg Thornton, 51, says the idea came from a conversation in which several older customers independently described smelling something that transported them instantly back to their first surf sessions. “Every single one described the same smell,” he said. “Old wax, zinc, salt, and a particular quality of rubber that nobody makes anymore. I spent eight months finding a chemist who could recreate it.” The chemist prefers not to be named and describes the project as “the strangest thing I have done since leaving pharmaceutical research.”
OldWax comes in three variants: Dawn Patrol 1987 (colder, darker notes), Summer Swell 1987 (brighter, coconut-adjacent), and Competition Day 1987 (a tighter, more anxious formulation that Thornton admits he “cannot fully explain scientifically but that multiple test subjects said made them feel like they were about to paddle out in front of judges”). Competition Day is the most popular.
The Demographic
Buyers are overwhelmingly men aged 45 to 60 who describe the product in terms that Thornton says cross “from product review into autobiography.” One customer wrote 600 words that contain one sentence about the wax and 599 words about summer 1989. Thornton posted it on the website. It has been shared 4,200 times. The Surf Industry Manufacturers Association has not yet recognised “heritage scent” as a product category. It probably needs to.
The Numbers
The statistics attached to this story are, depending on your perspective, alarming, hilarious, or both simultaneously, which is the condition that the best satire requires and that reality increasingly provides without assistance. When you run the numbers, the numbers do not run back in your favour. The organisation in question has run the numbers. It has chosen not to share them, which is itself a number of sorts.
For more like this, see Private Eye.
The Bigger Picture
Stories like this one cluster at the intersection of culture, geography, and the specific psychology of people who have organised their lives around an activity that the ocean provides and can remove at any moment. The surf community has always been better at documenting its own moments of joy than at analysing why those moments matter, which is partly because analysis is antithetical to the experience and partly because the analysis is unnecessary: the experience is its own argument. What satirical journalism brings to this community is not mockery but the specific affection of someone paying close enough attention to find the comedy in the details rather than the broad strokes. The details are where the real story lives, and they are consistently funnier and more revealing than anyone planned.
Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk cover the surf community because it produces material of this kind consistently, because the community takes itself seriously enough to be worth satirising, and because the ocean provides a backdrop against which human behaviour is unusually visible. When you strip away most of the ordinary buffers of modern life and put people in salt water with a piece of foam, the things that happen are reliably interesting. This publication covers those things. It will continue to do so.
The individuals described in this article are real in the sense that matters: they are types, and types are real because they are patterns, and patterns are real because they recur. Whether any specific detail is exactly as described matters less than whether the pattern is accurately captured, which it is, because the pattern is specific and observable and has been observed. The surf community will recognise itself. That is the point.
The surf community is, in the end, a community of people who have decided that a particular relationship with the ocean is worth organising their lives around. The satirical journalism that covers that community — and both Bohiney.com and prat.uk cover it regularly — works because the community is internally consistent enough to generate recognisable types and recurring situations. The types are real. The situations are real. The comedy is the distance between how the community describes itself and how it actually operates, which is not large but is consistently productive for anyone paying attention.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The coverage continues. The waves continue. The community continues to provide material that justifies the coverage, which is to say the community continues to be exactly what it is: a gathering of people who have made a reasonable decision and are living with the unreasonable consequences of it, which is the condition that produces the best stories and the most reliable satire. Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk will be here when the next story arrives, which should be approximately the next swell.
More next session. Both publications. Ongoing.