For me, it’s difficult to separate the emotional connection and memories associated with this scent from the actual fragrance. Polo is a deep, heavy scent; it’s a well-balanced blend of greens, herbs, spice, and leather. It can be overpowering if applied to heavily, but used in moderation it’s simply a great all-purpose fragrance.
Interlock is 100% cotton according to their website. Our personal preference is to dry clean our polos to prevent fade and premature collar wear, but this is a bit extreme in time and cost, but it does extend the life by years from our experience. There are two different fabric options but both are cotton variants. These options are cotton Mesh and cotton Interlock. Cotton Mesh is the original fabric for the Polo and it is what most people wear.
However, when I want to go back in time to the greatest green, leathery, mossy performance beast of my young adulthood, I reach for this classic. I haven’t tried the most recent formulation. I hope, for the sake of this legend, that it is better than what has been offered for the previous few years. 1972 marked the opening of Ralph Lauren’s store on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, California, his first freestanding store. In 1972, Lauren released a short-sleeve cotton shirt in 24 colors. This design, emblazoned with the company’s famed logo—that of a polo player, created by tennis pro René Lacoste—became the brand’s signature look.
Soon the tobacco joins – I’ve heard some saying it smells like a cigarette ash tray – I don’t mind. The drydown is dark – heavy leather with woods and tobacco but still with pine note infused. Smells like being bashed around the head with a pine branch. The first fragrance I’ve loved rather than just polo dress shirts liked, before I was pretty disillusioned with what was on offer wrt modern fragrances, I think I might favour the older ones. The opening is quite harsh and reminds me of Paco Rabanne Pour Homme. I get mainly a synthetic pine note that seems to become more natural smelling as the fragrance evolves.
This seems to contain all the qualities I have been looking for in fragrances like Aramis and Caron Yatagan. It is definitely a green leather chypre devoid of the awkward “celery note” of Yatagan and with a bit cleaner, more defined and spicier drydown than Aramis . I get mainly artemisia and pine, oakmoss and vetiver, tobacco, rugged old school leather accord , just the right amount of sweetness in the background. Of course, it still has that boozy classic men’s cologne smell that is far from clean by modern standards. At the same time, it has more depth than I would have imagined. Not sure about the performance, though — seems to morph into a skin scent as fast as the two aforementioned classics nowadays.
It is a bit dated, but in a classic sense of the word. My only caveat is that the tobacco note is somewhere between the raw dried leaf and smoked cigarette smell. It becomes more evident on clothes as the day goes by.
Could you really swing a battle axe with one hand? Could you really defend your family from onslaught after endless onslaught of pending chaos and death? Not if you can’t pull off wearing this masculine beast of a fragrance. Macho scent but also classy, in the same category as Aramis in that sense.
I wore it uninterrupted throughout my twenties. It now evokes so many memories when I wear it now I just sink into nostalgia. Woody, green, but floral at the same time. It starts bright, leaving trails of grass and moss, before drying into leather and Patchouli, which for me is its dominant note.
This is the kind of fragrance that they don’t make now (unless it’s niche). I own two formulas – a bottle from 1997 and a bottle from 2014. The so called “vintage” is heavier on leather and has much darker pine note. The newer one is focused on the cigarette “ash” and has a lighter green pine note . It opens up green but definitely it’s dark green and ashy.
My father wore this in the 80s, 90s. 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 polo dress shirts 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 .