1 Million
Paco Rabanne (2008)

Opening is genuinely nice. I am really getting some of that blood orange, and it does literally smell like a fresh fruity bubble gum. However, after 15 minutes, it turns into a cloyingly sweet shower gel fragrance. This sweetness is not balanced by anything interesting, it's just cotton candy sweet and invasive. It's way too dull to be worth it for me to keep smelling it all day.

I have to say though, that it does get positive feedback. Not in a "sexy" kind of way, more in a "it smells clean" kind of way.

I'm so late to the game on this fragrance, but I thought I'd give it a shot, as it's absolutely notorious amongst the fragrance community. Anymore, it seems 1 Million is more often the butt of jokes than serious contemplation. But here's how my uninitiated nose feels about it:

It's sweet. It's a sugar bomb. It's fruit sugar. It's candy. It's rich. It's delicious.

I can now see why people say this one is for teenagers and young adults, though I am averse to categorizing particular notes or accords based on gender or age. I'm a guy in my 50's who adores sweet fragrances. And this is sweet. Probably the sweetest fragrance I've put my nose on yet (short of, perhaps, al Rehab's Choco Musk, which is straight up milk chocolate.)

But I love it. My nose keeps going back to it, over and over. I can likewise see why this is/was such a popular clubbing fragrance. I'm only wearing the edt, and this thing is projecting off of me like a sugarmonster, and I can see where it would just radiate like a nuclear sugarbomb off of sweaty dancers at a nightclub. I guess I thought Le Male was sweet, until I smelled this.

Yeah, I could see adding this to my collection. I could see wearing it around the house for myself, so I'd get that pleasant sweetness wafting off myself throughout the day while I worked on projects. I'm not entirely sure I'd wear this one out that often, but it would be nice to have the option. 1 Million is for sure its own thing, and it does that thing well, and has earned its reputation, both positive and negative, for the sheer level of sweetness it achieves. I'm kind of an instant fan.

Wanna smell like all the other boys?

Now this is something. Something I can't think of anything worse to smell of than. Boys' locker room after gym class at a "traditional" boarding school for rich teens with absentee parents and no authority figures to reign them in. You can feel the toxicity from a mile off. No thanks.

Sugary bubblegum sweetness. I can see the appeal and if I was 21 again I would most probably wear it. They say females like this one and can understand why. Being the wrong side of 40 it will be a pass from me.

A truly hideous and synthetic fragrance in an even worse bottle. A mix of sweet cloying amber and Cool Water. The divide is pretty strong on this fragrance. Pretty bad, though definitely not the worst thing I've smelled.