A few weeks ago, I met some people hard life People are here in Tulsa for a book club meeting at a local brewery. One of them had a gift for me: a 1970s Avon aftershave in a bottle shaped like the Teddy Roosevelt statue. Rip off Teddy’s head, and you’ll be hit with a pungent but manly scent that will burn the nose.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, I was annoyed because my dad had bottles of Avon aftershave like this in his bathroom.
He had ones the size of pheasants and ducks. After shaving, you plucked the bird’s head off, put some aftershave on your hands, and dabbed it on your face.
Your dad may also have had some of these novelty cologne- and aftershave-filled Avon decanters in his bathroom during the 70s and 80s. For about twenty-five years, you couldn’t go into an American house without stopping by. They came in the form of cars, eagles, ducks, dueling pistols, spark plugs and rearing horses. In addition to the TR bust, they had a plush white bust-sized statue of George Washington, whose head you popped off to get aftershave. How honorable for the father of our country.
So what happened to them? Why did this ubiquitous item of American bathrooms disappear? Now why doesn’t a man keep a glass Corvette full of cologne on his counter? Today, we’ll chart the rise and fall of the manly-shaped Avon Decanter.
rise of avon decanter
To understand the rise of the Avon Decanter, you need to understand the rise of Avon. Remember Avon? Maybe your mom was an Avon Lady in the 1980s, as well as hosting Tupperware parties so she could earn extra cash to buy school-time clothes for you in Montgomery Ward.
Well, Avon got its start in 1886, when a door-to-door bookseller named David McConnell noticed that the housewives on his street cared more about the free rose perfume samples he gave away than the books he was actually trying to sell. So he left books and got into fragrance business. To increase sales, she created an army of women who sold perfumes and soaps from catalogs to her neighbors, right there in their decorated parlors and living rooms. This was the birth of the Avon Lady. Hail, Avon Lady!
In the first half of the 20th century, the perfume and cologne bottles worn by Avon Ladies to friends and neighbors came in plain, standard sizes. Then, in the 1930s, Avon experimented with novelty-sized decanters, releasing a Mickey Mouse bottle in collaboration with Disney. It was a hit, but a one-off. For the next 30 years Avon continued to use standard bottles for its fragrances.
By the 1960s, competition in the cosmetics industry was becoming fierce, so Avon looked for ways to differentiate itself from the pack. I think an executive remembered that the Mickey Mouse-shaped perfume bottle had done well, so why not do it again? So in 1965, Avon released a decanter in the shape of a boot that contained men’s “Leather” cologne. It was a huge hit. They followed this in 1968 with a Sterling Roadster-shaped decanter. Hit also.
Avon found a winning strategy for moving its fragrances: putting them in fun-shaped bottles.
The best thing about this strategy was that Avon did not need to come up with new formulations for its fragrances. They took the same scent, offered it as both a cologne and an aftershave, and differentiated the bottle it came in. Avon would put the same product in a new crazy-sized bottle every year, and people would buy it, even if they had an entire bottle of the same cologne or aftershave unused at home. The TR aftershave that my friend gifted me smelled exactly like the aftershave in my father’s pheasant-shaped Avon decanter. Originally, Avon was no longer in the fragrance business, but in the novelty bottle business.
Which is probably smart because aftershave doesn’t smell very nice. After all, this was Avon, not Creed. Avon was offering a mass-market product, and so it had many mass-market fragrances in the 1970s. These fragrances, Quoting anchorman and cologne fan Ron Burgundy“There was a horrible smell. It stings the nose. In a good way.”
Over the next 20 years, Avon partnered with New Jersey glass manufacturer, Wheaton Glass, to produce thousands of bottles. Perfume bottles for women came in shapes like shoes, slippers, purses and handbags. The line of men found hard objects like cars, trucks, fishing reels, shotgun shells, spark plugs, footballs, dueling pistols – and busts of George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt.
The 1970s were the peak of the Avon Decanter. Avon’s catalog is filled with glass owls, deer, kangaroos, station wagons and nearly every car in Detroit. He also made a 32-piece chess set from the items.
It was during the 70s that the Avon novelty decanter became a collector’s item, like Beanie Babies or Department 56 Christmas houses in the 1990s. Avon saw this as an opportunity to exploit to make money, so they leaned into this consumer-driven trend. They released a limited quantity of bottles and started a club for collectors. People began printing price guides, telling people what their bottles were worth. There was even a national association of Avon collectors with national conventions and a newsletter called avon times.
Basically, you have people who buy a glass Corvette full of aftershave, never open it, and hide it in a closet with it still in the box, certain it will be worth a lot someday and pay for their kids’ college education. The TR bottle my friend gifted me was in a pristine, original box and was still filled with aftershave. Someone in Oklahoma probably bought it in the 70s and never used it thinking it would be worth thousands of dollars in 2026.
The Fall of the Avon Decanter
Finally, the fun-shaped Avon decanter is gone.
Why?
Well, two things ruined it: 1) Avon almost went bankrupt, and 2) consumer preferences changed.
By the late 1980s, Avon was burdened with more than a billion dollars of debt and had spent most of its years on a strange business buying spree that included medical-device makers and nursing homes. It spent the ’90s digging out, and in 1999, brought on Andrea Jung as its first female CEO with growing mandates to pull the brand into the modern beauty business and compete with department-store labels. The popular “ding dong, avon calling” image had to go, and so did the glass pheasants filled with aftershave.
Consumer tastes also changed. By the 1990s, people wanted less junk in their homes, and a shelf full of glass animals was dirty. Dad’s Avon bottles were taken to Goodwill. Avon was happy with this change and began putting their fragrances back in a plain bottle with a plain label. Today men buy fragrances for the scent, not for the bottle it comes in (although a nice-looking bottle is a nice bonus). The man of the 21st century is a scent enhancer; No bottlemaxing.
The Avon Decanter is dead. Long live the Avon decanter!
If you want to have one of these manly shaped Avon decanters on your dresser, well, you’re in luck! Because the market was flooded with them during the 70s and 80s and because people hoarded them, thinking they would pay for their retirement, you can commonly find mint-condition Avon decanter bottles filled with cologne or aftershave in antique stores or at estate sales. My friend found a TR One at an antique shop in Guthrie, OK. eBay also has a bunch of these. There’s probably a pair still sitting on your dad’s dresser. Ask him if you can take them off his hands. My dad’s bottles of Pheasant and Duck aftershave are still in his bathroom. Perhaps now the time has come for him to hand them over to his son. The creation of a revered tradition.
Buy decanter bottles for decoration and to connect with an interesting part of quirky American history. But don’t wear cologne. It smells very bad. And it burns. In a good way, I guess.
