Guilty Pleasures: Ralph Lauren Polo 67 EDP Extreme

[00:00:02][music and singing] [music] >> Hi, welcome back to the Fragrance Standard, where I bring you honest news and reviews from the fragrance world, so you guys don't have to waste your money.

[00:00:18]I hope you're all well.

[00:00:20]This time, I'm definitely getting down off my high horse of niche and artisanal, and I'm looking at a guilty pleasure. So, these are fragrances that we kind of like secretly, and we just find it hard to admit to the outside world, or maybe even ourselves. And, you know, I've spoken about this a little before. I do think this is a problem for people like me. I accept I've got this issue. I am a slight snob when it comes to fragrance. You know, I enjoy really good quality things uh in general, not just fragrances. And that kind of bleeds over to the point at which I might stop letting myself enjoy certain aspects of the fragrance hobby because I perceive them to be cheap, or not good enough, you know, compared to what I've already got. And that's a real shame. So, I've had to have like a word with myself and say, "You know what? You should just go with whatever you like." Now, this one, it's probably my guiltiest pleasure, I'll be honest, because I think most of us have got like a bottle of Bleu de Chanel in the cupboard somewhere that we use from time to time. Most of us might have a Sauvage hanging around. And they're good quality fragrances, you know, I'm not feeling guilty about them because I don't think they're good. I just think that they are massively overused, a bit like uh Aventus, you know, that that has a slightly different take on things because it's obviously a higher price point. it's considered to be a premium fragrance, so maybe it doesn't have the connotations the others do, but I think it would be wrong of me not to enjoy those fragrances, and they're popular for a reason, right?

[00:02:10]Because they're probably really good, and people like the smell of them, you know, that's what this is all about at the end of the day. It's about liking the smell of something. Let's not make it too much more complicated than that.

[00:02:21]I know we like to. What really kind of concerns me is that if I go down that snobby kind of close-minded route, I can almost predict the end result, which is where me and like three other really nerdy guys are sat in a room somewhere, and we're smelling this bottle and saying, "Oh, it's got the aromas of cat hair and metal and rotten vegetables.

[00:02:44]It's amazing. It's so amazing." And, you know, I've kind of met people like that, and I'm a little bit like that myself.

[00:02:51]You know, I've smelled some things which I know 99% of the public would be horrified at smelling, and I'm kind of finding things that I like in there, and you can train yourself to really like unusual fragrances as well over time.

[00:03:07]Sometimes I've really fallen in love with fragrances that I would say are like 50% polarizing. Amouage Interlude is probably a good example there of a fragrance that definitely would have like 50% of people being interested and saying, "Yeah, they quite like it." And 50% of people saying, "What What What What on earth is that?" You know, I was on the fence of, "Well, that's quite extreme." when I first ever smelled it, and I then kind of had a weird need to go back and smell it again, and then over time I actually grew to love it to the point that it's probably in my top three fragrances now. So, there's an element of that as well. It's not all about just being a snob. I think you can fall in love with difficult fragrances over time.

[00:03:52]But, let's get back to this. My guiltiest pleasure and uh I'll just get it out the way. It's It's a Ralph Lauren. It's Polo 67, and this is the Eau de Parfum Extreme. Make sure I get the variant right because there are so many Polos. This is a 2026 release. It's pretty new. I actually got this because when I bought a different fragrance, I think I bought the old Gucci Guilty fragrance, and that came with a couple of free samples. That's a really good leathery fragrance. I'll review that later on. You can still buy those. It was when Gucci were really taking chances, and it's kind of crossover from designer to niche in terms of smell.

[00:04:35]Great fragrance. This came as a free sample. My wife smelt it, and she I wasn't actually in the house at the time. She rang me up. Uh I was in another country, and she said, "Well, your fragrance bottles arrived, and by the way, I've smelt the samples, and I absolutely love one of these samples."

[00:04:53]As I've said before, she doesn't know much about fragrances. She doesn't know much about the brands. She's obviously heard of some of the brands, but she doesn't know where they sit in terms of perceived quality, etc., or price.

[00:05:06]As you said, there's this great one.

[00:05:08]It's from Ralph Lauren. It's Polo 67 Extreme. And I said, "Okay, I'll go to the airport and smell some." And I In the back of my mind, I was already thinking, "Oh god." Because Polo has this really bad reputation. I had a bottle of it when I was younger, when it was kind of I guess then it was considered sort of premium, and it was kind of high-end.

[00:05:31]But, nowadays, it's really fallen off its perch, and you know, like Polo, Joop, you can see them always on the discount aisles. You know, if you go to one of those supermarkets that's got stuff in the middle of the aisle, you often find these type of fragrances there or these brands of fragrances there or you go to like a TK Maxx or somewhere like that, you tend to see these heavily discounted. You can pick up dupes for like 20 quid.

[00:05:59]Uh Polo, I've seen the same, you know, you can pay about 20 for a bottle of Polo. So, they've really devalued their brand. They clearly produce way more than they could sell and they have to push it out through channels. This was worse than the gray market. So, you've got gray market channels which are one thing which are pretty heavily discounted. Then you've got like a step down from that of just punting stuff out at really cheap prices to places like TK Maxx where they get sold as these, you know, end-of-line stock or last year's stock and they are ridiculously cheap.

[00:06:35]That is a really good way to damage your brand. You will really struggle to get back to a premium status if you have gone down that road. Burberry are a case in point. Burberry were a very high-end brand in the UK at one point. Uh then they kind of went into this chav fashion era where they were pushing out baseball caps and all kinds of crappy chavy t-shirts and whatever. Previous to that, they were making beautiful women's jackets, you know, really high-end, good quality. Uh my mom always aspired to own a Burberry coat and she used to go into shops and kind of stare at them and they were like 850 pounds which was kind of beyond her spending limits 20 or 30 years ago. So, they had this really great reputation. People really respected the brand. That famous Burberry check fabric they used was just like hinted on the inside of things. It was like a finishing off thing that wasn't open to everyone to see. It let you know it was a Burberry item, but it was kind of privately behind the scenes.

[00:07:42]They pushed that right to the front, released all these crazy baseball caps and stuff, and absolutely smashed the value out of their brand. They are slowly climbing back up again because they've pulled away from that high street chavy t-shirts and caps thing.

[00:07:57]They've pulled out of a lot of the very heavy discount stores. So, they're kind of trying to re-establish themselves again, but Ralph Lauren Polo probably personifies this in the fragrance world that they have fallen far in terms of perception. You know, that that's how people perceive Polo now is this kind of cheap, almost like a teenager's scent, and most people would actively avoid it based on brand alone. I even found this when I went to buy some. So, I was in a different country when she called me, and I thought, "Well, I'm coming back through. I'll have a look in duty-free."

[00:08:34]And duty-free normally has all the designer stuff in there.

[00:08:38]And I asked, this was in Warsaw, "You know, have you got any Ralph Lauren stuff?" Nope. I actually did it in a department store as well. They didn't even have any Ralph Lauren fragrances. I was looked at like I was kind of asking for something really unpleasant. You know, if you want to talk about fragrance snobbery, this this shop owner and uh the person in the duty-free were like, "Oh, no, we don't have those." I did actually find them in the end in a duty-free. There was like a smaller shop when I got to my gate. And I thought, "Well, I'll pop in there." And they had it in there. So, it was tough to get even in a place that specializes in mass appeal, designer, reasonably priced perfumery. This was a a tough one to find. I would imagine you could pick it up in places like Boots and Superdrug in the UK, and probably your CVSs and places like that in the US. I'm not exactly sure, but that's kind of where I imagine you would find it. But, yeah, fairly okay bottle. It's kind of what you would expect, classic Polo bottle shape. But, I've got to tell you guys, I was very pleasantly surprised.

[00:09:45]Let me give it a spray. So, nothing wrong with the atomizer at all.

[00:09:49]Very, very sweet in the air. That's the first thing I pick up is some sweetness.

[00:09:55]So, I'm getting sweet pineapple. I'm getting a little citrus. I've got some spices there in the background. And then I've got like hints of wood, hints of leather. But, it's it's a very pleasing scent. It's a little bit spicy, really nice and sweet. It's something that I know would be a crowd-pleaser. If people didn't know what this was, I think they would definitely enjoy smelling it. On your Parfumo and Fragrantica, it gets like a mid to upper seven rating in terms of whether people like the smell of it or not. I can't help but think that's probably in part due to the fact that they know it's Polo. So, if you read a lot of the reviews on there, you see people saying, "This is cheap, you know, this is a bunch of old rubbish." Which, of course, there's like a biased like brand perception going on that they know they're reviewing Polo. So, in those forums, they enjoy their status as kind of high-end reviewers, you know, using all the fancy words and kind of describing, you know, in like absolute detail what they get out of these perfumes. Then, you're expecting them to be completely honest about reviewing something like a Polo. They're not probably going to be honest. They are going to feel embarrassed about saying, "I actually really enjoyed Polo 67 Extreme."

[00:11:21]I'm not embarrassed to say that. I really, really enjoyed it. I think it is a really good dumb reach fragrance. It's very pleasing. I enjoy smelling it. My wife absolutely loves it because she has none of this bias, you know, she really doesn't care. She just smells it and she's like, "Oh my god, that is so good." And she's literally like, you know, nose on the neck, just smelling away and and kind of making funny little noises because she's so pleased to smell it. And that tells me all I need to know, you know, if someone's getting that much pleasure out of smelling this and I've put on, you know, I own four, 500 pound bottles of fragrance, which she's fairly indifferent to. She'll smell it and she'll go, "Well, I know that you really like it, you know, so." And she's basically saying she doesn't like it, but she knows that I obviously like it, so she's going to be polite about it.

[00:12:14]But with this, I can tell from her facial features, she's really taken with it, you know, she really, really enjoys it and that gives me joy and it's made me be honest with myself and think, do I really enjoy it? And the answer is, yes, I do really enjoy it. I absolutely love the smell. I've heard people liken this to like, oh, it's just going to be a cheap Creed Aventus. So, I've got the little bit of Creed Aventus here.

[00:12:41]This is a newer batch of Aventus.

[00:12:45]I mean, there's a slight similarity that they've both got pineapple in them. The Aventus is a lot less sweet.

[00:12:53]I think it lacks some of the kind of spiciness of this one. There's a similarity. That's about it. I definitely wouldn't class this as like a cheap Aventus other than the fact they're both perfumes and they're quite pineapple heavy. This is more pineapple heavy. This is like a sweet pineapple, like if you've ever had pineapple cubes, the sweet that you know, that you had as kids or like tinned pineapple that comes in like an overly sugary pineapple juice. This is what is reminded of here in the Polo, whereas the Aventus is more like a photorealistic pineapple and it's more of a background smell. So, I guess if I had to be critical, I would say yes, this is slightly synthetic-smelling, but that doesn't necessarily mean bad.

[00:13:42]You know, there's lots of things that smell slightly synthetic that are very enjoyable. A huge amount of things actually. So, I don't see synthetic as being completely bad. I'm not like a super artisanal guy where everything has to be 100% natural. I don't really care about that. So, being natural doesn't mean it's going to smell great. You know, if it smelt of cow manure, that's very, very natural, but you probably don't want to walk around smelling like that. Although, there would definitely be some kind of artisanal guys that would smell that and go, "Oh, I'm picking up all these lovely aromas coming from it." Like I said, people kind of look past the bad in order to find good in something just in order to be like really occupying this tiny niche area that they feel good about themselves in. So, we've got to be careful of of doing that and ending up or walking around smelling bloody awful.

[00:14:34]I mean, if everyone walked around smelling like this, there would be no complaints my end. It smells really, really pleasing. My wife actually said she would happily wear this as well. She does wear a couple of other men's designer fragrances and she's already tried this on her wrist. I'll pop a bit on skin, but yeah, she she really liked it. It's not super manly. I would say it's it's probably 60/40 in terms of masculine and feminine. So, it's leaning masculine, but it's not super masculine.

[00:15:07]So, it's a little bit alcoholic on the skin when you first spray it, but you give it a few seconds, that disappears.

[00:15:14]And it's not I'm not talking about a pleasant boozy note, I'm talking about I'm actually picking up alcohol that the fragrance has been sat in. So, it's not something that's particularly contributing to the the smell at all.

[00:15:29]Yeah, and that's already gone literally in a few seconds that kind of pungent alcohol aroma has disappeared. And on skin, I think the pineapple smells slightly less sweet. I'm getting a little bit more woods in the background.

[00:15:42]I can pick up a little bit of sandalwood. It's piney as well on skin.

[00:15:46]I find it a little more piney. And I actually really like pine fragrance. So, I'm I'm quite happy with that. But yeah, a sweet, spicy, piney pineapple.

[00:15:59]Good combo for me. I enjoy it. I will continue to enjoy it. I will especially be wearing it if I take the wife anywhere because she's very very happy if I wear that and I'm happy if she's happy. So, guys, I would strongly suggest you try this. It I know it's probably off the beaten track for most of us. Give it a smell. Try to drop your preconceptions or biases about the brand itself and just be honest and think, "Did I enjoy that?"

[00:16:29]And if you did, buy it. You know, it's pretty reasonably priced as well. Uh you just have to go through the embarrassment of actually asking for it in the shop like I did and yeah, I still lived. So, you'll be fine. And just to see if we got the note breakdown anywhere near correct, have a look on Parfumo.

[00:16:51]Bring it up here. So, we've got top notes uh bergamot, cardamom, lemon. So, I picked up some citrus obviously. We picked up some spices. So, the bergamot and lemon are giving us the citrus. The cardamom is giving us the spice. We've got no alcohol in there, so I'm right. The alcohol smell you first pick up is is just part of the solution. It's not actually going to be a recognized note in there.

[00:17:14]It's not like a rum note or anything like that. Heart notes, we've got pineapple, clary sage, and bourbon geranium. Now, I definitely didn't pick up the geranium. I'm not actually picking up anything floral in there, to be honest.

[00:17:30]Yeah, I can't perceive anything floral.

[00:17:33]There's a There's a slight greenness, if I really think about it, like a green floral fragrance. So, maybe that's the geranium.

[00:17:43]Uh sage kind of, it's very, very much in the background. I wouldn't say I can easily pick that up, either. And then, we have cedarwood, leather, sandalwood, and vetiver.

[00:17:56]Interesting, vetiver's in there, as well. I'm not getting vetiver.

[00:18:00]Now, I obviously have worn this a couple of times, so I know what it's like on the dry down.

[00:18:05]It dries down to a sweet woody type fragrance.

[00:18:11]It's It keeps the hint of pineapple there. It does dry down over time. It loses a lot of the citrus notes.

[00:18:18]Obviously, they're the top notes that are going to be burnt off over time quickest. And you just end up with this really nice sweet, woody, slightly fruity vibe going on. Very, very pleasing. It's fairly long-lasting, you know, I've put it on it's lasted me 6 or 7 hours.

[00:18:39]It's not a massive projector, but it projects certainly enough. So, I've got no complaints with its performance at all. You can always add more sprays.

[00:18:49]It's not going to break the bank if you do have to do that. But, yeah, it's a good performer, overall. I've got no complaints with it. The smell is good.

[00:18:57]My wife loves it. So, it's got to be a thumbs up for Polo 67 eau de parfum extreme. Mouthful of a title, but there we have it. Silver bottle. Don't get it confused with the others, because there are a couple of polos that are fairly recent releases that are not so good.

[00:19:18]You know, I didn't enjoy them. I didn't enjoy the smell of them. So, be careful.

[00:19:22]Don't just order a random newish-looking Polo and hope for the best. This is a silver bottle. It's the 67 extreme variety.

[00:19:32]Let me know if you've smelled this or let me know what your guilty pleasure is. I'd love to hear other people's.

[00:19:38]I've got to admit I actually like Joop as well. Joop was something I used to wear when I was 14 or 15 and I fell in love with a girl that used to wear Joop when I was very young. It was unrequited love and I used to really love that smell and I started wearing it kind of because I'd smell it on this girl.

[00:19:57]So, I still have love for that as well.

[00:20:00]I don't own any anymore and I probably should buy a bottle because it's so cheap and it's just nice to have memories, you know, that's part of the beauty of this hobby is you're collecting fragrance and you're also collecting and remembering things that happened. So, it's it's really lovely from that point of view. But, yeah, I would love to hear what your guilty pleasures are. Stick them down in the comments and if you've got any that I kind of share, maybe I'll review them in like a guilty pleasures monthly. We'll see how we get on with that. And if you haven't smelled this before and you go out and smell it, also let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear your opinions. We can probably be a bit more honest in the comment section than we can if we're writing reviews in Fragrantica or Parfumo. There's kind of no judgment here and if you just hate this stuff and you think I've got terrible taste, you're welcome to tell me that as well.

[00:20:57]Thank you very much, guys. Thanks for watching. I'm away for a few days this week, but hopefully at the end of the week I'll have some more content out for you and have a great week. I'll catch you soon.