Paco Rabanne 1 Million

The power of marketing

This is a sour, rosy scent. A cool sour rose with a warm, soft spicy background. For me, this particular kind of sourness is very off-putting and ugh-inducing. It smells like a hairspray, almost. After an hour or so the sourness diminishes and the fragrance is mostly spicy sweet, with cool sour rose lingering. At this point, I enjoy the scent. There’s not much time for enjoyment because in three hours it’s mostly gone.

The spicy sweet part is quite similar to Jean Paul Gaultier Le Male Le Parfum. It’s a popular, highly rated perfume. If you don’t mind cardamom, why not get that instead? Both are clubbing scents, for the young, dumb, and full of cum. There was a question on /r/fragrance what's the most slutty perfume a man can wear, and 1 Million came up first by a large margin. Not that it's a bad thing. They also mentioned Le Male Le Parfum.

Some comments on Fragrantica say people hate on 1 Million because it's popular. Maybe. I think it is the other way: the scent became popular not because it's good (because it really is not: look at the rating, look at the popularity over the years), but because of how they marketed it. I mean, come on, a fucking gold billet and "1 Million".

Young crowds would love any half-decent and original fragrance presented like that. And they did. It's probably the same type of people who love Fast And Furious 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and would love 12, if it was made. Invictus is the same case: packaged as hero juice, in reality smells like sweet grass. Sauvage would be another example (though it’s better than the two). Apparently a perfume doesn’t need to be good to be popular, it just needs to be original and easily recognizable, proper marketing will do the rest. Sometimes you don’t even need marketing, like in case of Baccarat Rouge 540.

Come to think of it, originality may indirectly imply that a perfume is not too good, because there are tens of thousands of fragrances and it is difficult to invent something novel and good at the same time. Anyway, thanks for reading this essay.

2/5 initially, 3-4/5 later

5/10 initially, 7/10 later