No one needed to know what Elon Musk smells like, yet here we are. The billionaire troll and prolific breeder launched his own fragrance, Burnt Hair.
Musk announced the project on Twitter, updating his bio to read "Perfume Salesman." (In 2017, he changed his bio to "Hat Salesman" after selling over $500,000 worth of hats via his infrastructure venture The Boring Company).
"Please buy my perfume so I can buy Twitter," he added, referencing his months-long entanglement with the social media platform.
Touted as "the essence of repugnant desire," Burnt Hair prices at $100 a bottle and ships in Q1 of 2023 (eyeroll). Specific notes and accord aren't listed on The Boring Company's website — personally, I'd love to know which fragrance firm was tasked with the stench.
On Wednesday, Musk claimed he sold 10,000 bottles of the perfume, bringing sales to a total of $1 million. Sales allegedly reached $2 million by the end of the day.
Perfumes emulating "bad" smells aren't exactly a new thing. Demeter, a company that bills itself as a "library of fragrance," sells spritzes of Play-Doh, stable, and turpentine. In 2006, niche fragrance house Etat Libre d'Orange released Secretions Magnifique, the scent of semen, saliva, and sweat.
In fact, most of your favorite fragrances likely contain notes that, on their own, smell fecal, animalic, or "indolic": galbanum, musk, and jasmine are a few examples. Perfumers manage to transform these stinky notes into the most intoxicating of scents.
I don't usually judge a fragrance by its bottle (or its creator), but Eau de Elon stinks, through and through.
