It has always bothered me that Drakkar Noir is so expensive. Online, hard to get for under $25. In discount retailers, even harder to get for under $30. At retail? Ridiculous, naturally, typically $45 for 50 ml, and don't even know what they ask for 100 ml bottles. I'd scratch my head and ask myself, what gives? Why is this old foghorn from the early eighties still commanding a premium price, when nobody really wears it anymore?
Even on eBay, it was difficult to source a big bottle for less than $30. Many would fall under that price, but they'd come without a box, which always put me off. If you can't get Drakkar Noir with its box, one wonders what you're really getting. The other day, this all changed -- I hopped on eBay and found what I'd always hoped to find -- Drakkar Noir has now slid into clearance bin prices. I just bought a 100 ml bottle with its box for $16, free shipping. This stuff is now cheaper than Cool Water. Finally!
But the question is, why now? Why didn't this happen twenty years ago, when the fragrance was still well past its expiration date? There's no clear reason, but I have my own theory, and I think it's kind of obvious, once you get past the shock of seeing the market turn on a famous men's cologne to the point where it prices it under Coty's Aspen on some sites. Drakkar Noir is a sharp, crisp, bitter, soapy, somewhat peppery, somewhat green/grey lavender-centric fougère. You know what isn't popular today, and hasn't been popular for over ten years? Sharp, bitter, greenish fougères.
But not being popular (in the high school cafeteria sense of the word) isn't enough to drive a fragrance's price down by ten dollars or more. There are plenty of fairly esoteric frags that go for big bucks. If Drakkar Noir was the first to go against the grain, it'd never lose its retail value. No, the thing that put it out to pasture is what is popular: extremely sweet and cloyingly saccharine olfactory sugar bombs. Liquid candy that you can spray everywhere, even on your crotch, and suddenly feel hungry. Everyone and their cousin is into these extreme derivations of Le Male and Joop! Homme that have evolved from those relatively modest semisweet masterpieces into nefariously nectarous beasts.
Against this gourmand tableau, Drakkar Noir smells all the more bitter, peppery, smoky, unapproachable, and downright intimidating. Drakkar Noir is too much of a contrast, and a bridge too far for the budding Gen Z crowd of saplings who now smell Le Male and Joop! Homme and wrinkle their noses. The thought that anyone who was born after 2000 would find Drakkar Noir an easy wear is increasingly laughable. Not so in 2015. No so in 2005. Certainly not so in 1995, when virtually every other fragrance that was released riffed on Guy Laroche's signature masculine. One forgets that Drakkar Noir was once the Dior Sauvage of the fragrance world, inspiring countless imitations, clones, and smell-alikes that barely hid what they were trying to do. For nearly two decades, Drakkar Noir was the cornerstone of masculine perfumery, shaping its trends and defining its essence. How distant and even bizarre that very fact has become now.
I'm sure there were legions of men who revelled in the discovery that Drakkar Noir had officially lost its premium department store cache, and was no longer going for Macy's prices. I imagine the hen-pecked Gen X guy who walked into a Walmart in 2003 and happily discovered Drakkar Noir priced at $38 instead of $48. Fast forward to today, when finally, after extra innings, it isn't even worth Walmart prices anymore, and can be had for less than $18, consistently less than Avon fragrances. It probably means nothing to the youngsters out there, but I'm overjoyed. Finally I can stock up on a few bottles of Drakkar Noir, and wear it with abandon.