King Charles and family are known to not be fans of the beard.
Indeed, a significant portion of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, was devoted to performative outrage over his family’s efforts to get him to shave.
These efforts failed, and instead Harry upped sticks and moved to California, where he continues to defiantly nurture a decidedly republican crumb catcher of Abraham Lincoln proportions, untroubled by the attentions of the royal razor.
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There could hardly be a keener exponent of the clean-shaven look, by contrast, than Harry’s father, King Charles, whose upper lip is not just stiff, it’s also, it seems, permanently and immaculately hairless.
Now royal fans have been given a rare insight into the monarch’s grooming routine.
In a decidedly bourgeois development, King Charles’ gift shop at his Highgrove home (memorably ridiculed on the satirical TV show The Windsors as selling outrageously expensive organic chutneys, bundles of sticks and handmade garden tools) has launched Highgrove Splash, an aftershave inspired by the gardens of Highgrove that might just bring a touch of regal luxury to every shaving experience.
At £135 ($170) for 100 ml, it’s not exactly cheap, but Highgrove Splash is affordable even to those not in King Charles’ UHNW bracket (he has an estimated net worth of $770 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List.) And as the common man anoints himself with “delicate top notes of cypress and lemon,” he may briefly imagine himself a monarch; the stately halls of Buckingham Palace, the whisper of ancient tapestries, the grandeur of royal banquets.
The Highgrove website says that the new fragrance has been made by the highly traditional London barber and perfumier Truefitt & Hill.
While we can safely say that Prince Harry will not be putting in an order for it, one wonders whether the king himself will be wearing l’eau de toilette, or if this is just a diffusion range for the plebs.
Until now, Charles has been thought to wear the classic Dior aftershave Eau Sauvage. Harry wrote in his memoir: “He’d slather the stuff on his cheeks, his neck, his shirt. Flowery with a hit of something harsh, like pepper or gunpowder.”
An official spokesperson for the king did not return The Daily Beast’s frankly impertinent request for comment on how the king smelled. A palace source said, “N’eau comment.”
