I really don’t know about the reformulation. The bottle I have is recent and superb. Let me put it this way, if it is reformulated just think of it as a new perfume and it would stand head and shoulders above any new release or any of the new Tom Ford Fougeres. I will always have Polo in my collection, even if I decided to shrink it down to only 10 fragrances. Polo is one of the easiest scents in the world to overspray. I think we’ve all been in the room with a guy who wore too much of this on too warm of a day.
Wear it with a Polo shirt and aviator sunglasses or a pin stripe suit and power tie. My relationship to Polo Ralph Lauren might be summed up as “love the sin, hate the sinner”. To me, this perfume symbolizes the masculine ideal of the lower-upper-middle class suburban man of the 80s. He is that guy who was the first on his street to get a Macintosh home computer . He bought a small sailing boat at some point . He was an “Atari democrat”, but the last time he voted blue was Al Gore in 2001 (he’ll say he voted for Biden but that’s a lie).
Polo tried hard to add flankers, red, blue, that weird orange one. Keep producing just this in that vintage green bottle and I’ll be happy. I’m surprised how little I want to use but it’s because I need to keep this bottle for the rest of my life. This is definitely a barbershop type fragrance; I’ve used Polo Ralph Lauren t shirt aftershaves which smelled very similar. It’s quite nice, but it’s not my favourite of this genre, or at this price point, so I’m not likely to get a full bottle unless I come across one at a yard sale or for pennies online. I wonder if some of the older formulations would have impressed me more.
It lost that something special, those truly rich and deep notes. Todays version, it’s quite obvious that the quality has been stripped from it. Very similar to Paco Rabanne pour homme ralph lauren t shirt but it lasts much longer and doesn’t have that gross soapy opening pour homme does. I wear this a few times a month but with the current formulation I can get 12 hours out of this.
Growing up in a catholic country, when I was a kid, some groups would have religious figures going house to house for pray-overs. One I remember was of the Virgin Mary. They give out some green cotton doused with minty green oil, and this reminds me of that.