Baccarat Rouge 540: How the cult perfume conquered pop culture

If it was up to Francis Kurkdjian, he probably wouldn’t talk about the perfumes he creates. “There is a quote from [French playwright and novelist] Françoise Sagan, who is someone I really love,” he tells me over a video call from Paris as our interview is wrapping up. “She said once that she hates interviews. She hates talking about her things because she puts so much of herself into them. The piece was self-explanatory, so she always wondered why she had to add so many more layers, or so many more stories. When I read that, I loved it so much.”

Unfortunately for Kurkdjian, he’s had to talk quite a lot about his work over the years: an inescapable consequence of how wildly popular his creations have become. After building his reputation on fragrances like Le Male for Jean Paul Gaultier (one of the world’s best-selling masculine fragrances) and Narciso Rodriguez for Her, in 2013 Kurkdjian was commissioned by the renowned French crystal manufacturer Baccarat to create a scent to mark the brand’s 250th anniversary. Given carte blanche, he took inspiration from the crystal-making process, and also the process of making the colour red. 

“That was the very first time I had that total freedom of building up a story from scratch and being able to basically create a fragrance from A to Z,” he says. “That was very important to me because it also gave me the responsibility to succeed, in a way, and I became accountable for the success of the perfume. So I’m very happy that this happened, and I still think about it now.” 

Originally supposed to be a limited run, Kelly St John, then vice-president of beauty at Neiman Marcus, fell in love with the perfume and told Kurkdjian if he could make more, she would sell it. Thus a fragrance phenomenon was born.

Maison Francis Kurkdjian’s Baccarat Rouge 540 has since become one of the best-selling luxury fragrances in the world. It’s also one of the most talked about, having transcended the realm of perfume to become a pop culture symbol of luxury, status and conspicuous consumption, on par with cars, watches and designer bags. Pro basketball and NFL players namecheck it in interviews; it’s been referenced in songs by rappers like Drake, Meek Mill and Bad Gyal; Rihanna (famously the best smelling celebrity) is a fan, and Olivia Rodrigo wears it on tour. In 2023, it was the most viewed fragrance on TikTok globally. 

So what is it about the perfume that caused it to be such a runaway success? Kurkdijan breaks it down almost forensically (perhaps the result of having been asked so much about it). “First of all, the name Baccarat,” he says. “It relates to royalty, relates to aristocracy, relates to something being luxurious. Baccarat put the chandeliers in castles, in sultans’ houses, at the Tsar’s in Russia, at the White House. So Baccarat is a symbol of power. And pop culture, rap culture, is based on power.”

Then there’s the colour red. “Red relates to something very important, mostly because the red pigment was very expensive. It’s a colour that was used only by religious people high in the hierarchy. All the operas in the world are red. So it’s another marker of luxury and extravagance.” The name is another factor he points to, both the familiarity of the word rouge (“it’s easy to pronounce everywhere”) and the mystery of 540. “You don’t exactly know what it means but when you get the meaning of the name it makes everything crystal clear – if I may play on words.” 

While those elements might explain its place in our popular imagination, Baccarat Rouge’s success would not have been possible without the scent itself being a hit. With notes of jasmine, Ambroxan and cedar, the fragrance is both sweet and musky. The New Yorker described it as smelling like “a new Porsche that happens to be filled with cotton candy”, while Olivia Rodrigo compared it to what an angel might naturally smell like. It is somewhat polarising; others have likened the smell to latex gloves, burnt plastic or the dentist’s office. Heaven and wealth, sugar and death are popular descriptions. To me, it smells like overripe fruit but in a really sexy way, rather than a sickening one.

While “sexy” is one of the most common adjectives used to describe Baccarat Rouge, that wasn’t Kurkdjian’s original intention. “It was not about creating a sexy perfume at all. My goal was to translate the feeling of something that is at the same time dense and luminous, that has a presence and yet it’s not too much or too heavy. It’s about those contrasts. It’s like an oxymoron.” And yet he can, in hindsight (“it’s always easier to post-rationalise the thing”), see where the claims come from. “There is a kind of saltiness and sweetness together, almost like when you kiss the skin of someone and you get that duality. Salty from the sweat and sweet from the perfume. There’s a kind of addiction that comes with that.” 

Since being released to the public in 2015, Baccarat Rouge has spawned an empire: an extrait, a hair mist, a body lotion, a body gel, a soap and a candle have all followed in its wake. Earlier this year a documentary, ICON(S): Maison Francis Kurkdjian, traced the cultural impact of the fragrance, while a multisensory installation inspired by Baccarat Rouge 540 made its debut at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. 

In 2025, the brand launched the Édition Millésime of the perfume, an ultra-limited edition of only 54 bottles a year which cost $28,000 each thanks to the inclusion of a precious ingredient – real ambergris, which makes up more than 15 per cent of the formula – and a specially crafted red crystal flacon. Kurkdjian pushes back against my suggestion that the price makes it more of an objet d’art than a perfume. “Of course it’s an object to be collected, because there’s only 54. So, yes, it’s meant to be very exclusive. [But] do I want it to be used and worn? Yes, of course. It’s meant to be used,” he says. “It’s refillable. We have a refillable service by shipping, with a special number, a special conciergerie. There’s a hotline dedicated to your own perfume.”

His inspirations, and the emotions behind the fragrances, come from everywhere and anywhere. “What we do is to talk about beauty. We talk about beautiful food, we talk about beautiful people, a beautiful time of the year. Everything is beautiful. It’s a beautiful world. And so it can be endless.” The only thing he refuses to take as a source of inspiration is stories anchored in negative concepts or emotions – these can inspire an “artistic perfume”, he says, but not a perfume to be worn, and certainly not one that will have global appeal. “It doesn’t make sense. I am here to enhance people’s lives, not to make them feel miserable.” 

He is also not here to speculate on what the legacy of Baccarat Rouge (or his own career) will be – that’s a job reserved for critics, to be discussed by people who have more detachment. “It’s very pretentious to me that you think that you’re going to leave a legacy, it’s not even my job to discuss that. I don’t have any distance with what I create,” says Kurkdjian, who was awarded Knight of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest national distinction, a couple of weeks after we spoke. “So it’s really a matter of… how can I say… staying humble.”