Old Spice is an American brand offering male grooming products including aftershaves, deodorants and antiperspirants, shampoos, body washes, shaving cream, and soaps. It is manufactured by Procter & Gamble. Old Spice was launched as an expansion of the Early American Old Spice line created by William Lightfoot Schultz's soap and toiletries company, Shulton Inc., in 1937. Early American Old Spice was marketed to women, and Old Spice was marketed as a men's fragrance and released before Christmas 1937.

Old Spice products were originally manufactured by the Shulton Company, founded in 1937 by William Lightfoot Schultz. A buyer at Bullock's in Los Angeles made Schultz aware of the emerging popularity of colonial American–style furniture, a trend spurred by the then-recent opening of Colonial Williamsburg. Shultz reasoned that an Early Americana–themed cosmetics line might also find favor. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York collection of early American objects provided a source of inspiration for packaging design; for the fragrance, Schultz was inspired by his mother's potpourri, and as a result, the first Old Spice product in 1937 was a woman's scent called Early American Old Spice. The product was received well and therefore was followed by Old Spice for men in 1938.

In 1970, Shulton became a subsidiary of American Cyanamid. In June 1990, Procter & Gamble purchased the Old Spice brand from American Cyanamid.

Schultz worked with perfumer Bert Hauck at Dodge & Olcott to create Early American Old Spice, which was marketed as a women's fragrance. They began with a scent Hauck had already developed, then refined it by adding notes until it evoked Schultz's memory of his grandmother's spice jug. The finished fragrance is categorized as a spicy amber on the modern fragrance wheel, with notes of rose petals and cloves. Shulton launched Early American Old Spice in 1937. Hauck developed Old Spice as a variation of Early American Old Spice to be marketed to men. Like Early American, it is an amber fragrance but it has citrus notes:

Perfumers have noted that Old Spice shares dominant notes with Coca-Cola (citrus, cinnamon, and vanilla), as well as l'Eau de Lubin (1798) by Parfums Lubin.

In response to a customer review in 2019, Old Spice stated that the Original After Shave scent was changed in 2016 'to comply with new regulations.'

Artist Enid Edson designed the original packaging. For Early American Old Spice, her inspiration was Zeruah H. Huernsey Caswell's hand-embroidered carpet displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For Old Spice, her inspiration was Colonial-era apothecary bottles. A.E. Hull Pottery Company developed the first aftershave and cologne bottles, which were made of white pottery with hand-painted drawings of the Grand Turk privateer used during the American Revolutionary War. In about 1948, a second ship drawing was added: the 1794 Recovery Salem. The bottles were packaged in cardboard boxes that had drawings of five different ships. In the mid-1940s, the packaging changed from pottery to glass. Wheaton Glass Company developed the glass, which had the luster of pottery.

In the 1990s, after Proctor & Gamble bought the fragrance line, they made other changes: the sailing ship was replaced by a sailboat; the glass bottles of eau de toilette and after shave had a plastic button as a cap; and its color was changed from light gray to white in 1992. In 2008, the white glass bottles gave way to plastic and the gray stoppers to red.