EIGHT & BOB
Then on a balmy summer’s evening in 1937 on the Côte d'Azur, Albert met a fresh faced American student touring France in a convertible. That young man was JFK, and he was taken with Albert’s mesmerizing cologne. John enticed Fouquet to leave him a sample of that fragrance at his hotel the morning after, accompanied with a handwritten note:
"In this bottle, you will find the dash of French glamour that your American personality lacks."
Fouquet later received a letter from John, since returned to America, thanking him for his gift and singing his new perfume’s praised. He implored Fouquet to send him eight more samples, along with “one for Bob.” Fouquet complied, enclosing the scent in glass Parisian pharmacy bottled embellished with a pattern he’d noticed on JFK’s shirt. The packaged was labeled “Eight and Bob.”
Not long after, Albert Fouquet was met with a flurry of requests in the post from Hollywood directors, producers, and actors, including Cary Grant and James Stewart.
Tragedy struck In the spring of 1939, when Albert died in an automobile accident near Biarritz, France. Some months later, Philippe, the butler who’d helped him all long and maintained filling out all perfume orders, was forced to leave his post with the Fouquet family at the outset of World War Two. Philippe carefully hid the bottles inside books that he cut by hand in his final shipments to America, lest the Nazi’s confiscate the precious contents.
Today, the formula for Eight & Bob has been recovered, along with its painstaking production process. It finds itself once more among the most exclusive colognes of elegant men throughout the world.
Distilled from a wild, aromatic Andean plant, that grows in short supply due altitude and seasonal growth, Eight and Bob is derived from an exacting selection process from which only seven percent of the ingredients harvested are actually used. Only a few bottles are allotted to each country where they are sold, making it a rare gem of both olfactory brilliance and historical wealth.
