What does Elon Musk's 'Burnt Hair' perfume really smell like? We asked our newsroom to do a blind test of the new fragrance.
Elon Musk's Boring Company launched a $100 perfume called "Burnt Hair" in October.
The company claims it smells "like leaning over a candle at the dinner table."
We obtained a bottle and asked our colleagues what they thought of the scent.
Elon Musk seems like he's on a mission to become a 21st century Renaissance man.
He is the world's richest person; the founder of several companies including Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company; and the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter.
Last October, he added "perfume salesman" to his list when he began selling a scent called "Burnt Hair" to the world.
The unisex fragrance is sold through The Boring Company, where it was originally listed for $100. Within days of launching, though, Musk announced on Twitter that all 30,000 bottles of the perfume had been purchased. Now, it's being re-listed on eBay, from a discounted $86.69 all the way up to a pie-in-the-sky asking price of $99,420.
The Boring Company describes the scent as "the essence of repugnant desire" which sounds, well, repugnant. At the same time, Musk's infrastructure and tunnel-building venture suggests that Burnt Hair recreates the smell of a candle on the dinner table "without all the hard work," which doesn't sound that bad. It isn't clear if Boring partnered with a perfumer to concoct its potion, or if it brewed up the batches itself. Boring didn't respond to Insider's request to explain.
So we were left with several questions. Is it supposed to smell good? Is it supposed to smell bad? And if it actually smells terrible, as the name implies, would that technically make it a success?
Insider decided to put the scent to the test ourselves. One of our editors ordered a bottle of Burnt Hair the day it was launched, and in late July, the package finally arrived — though there were some quality concerns right off the bat with some of the perfume leaking out during shipment.
The perfume comes in a velvety black box and the bottle itself is a garish red with the word "SINGED" printed at the bottom.
In order to keep our study as objective as possible we conducted a blind scent test. We sprayed the perfume on strips of paper and asked members of Insider's newsroom to give it a whiff and tell us their thoughts before we revealed what it was.
Notes of ash, cigarettes, regret, and ... horse hair?
Several staffers said the scent reminded them of cigarettes.
"It's like really smoky to the point where I'm like it almost smells like tobacco or cigarettes or something," said Madeline Renbarger, a reporter on the startups and venture capital team. At the same time she said she sensed some floral notes.
Deputy media editor Nathan McAlone sensed "stale cigarettes."
The cigarette-forward scent profile of Burnt Hair was seconded by those in the office who do smoke.
Darius Rafieyan, another reporter on the startups and venture capital team, initially didn't detect a scent on the paper.
"Wait, is there a smell on here?" he asked. Once he took a second whiff, though, he changed his mind. "Maybe there is, I can't tell. It smells like burning cardboard, like when you put a pizza box in a campfire."
Rafieyan was one of the only Insider staffers who attempted to analyze the scent straight from the source. Upon sniffing Burnt Hair directly from the bottle he concluded that it actually smelled better than most perfumes.
"I don't like it, but I like it a lot more than most perfumes," he said, "It's not super alcohol-forward, I don't really like most colognes or perfumes because they're so alcohol-y."
For others, the scent brought to mind some pretty specific scenarios. We heard everything from "old lady in church" and "BO" to "wildfire in Colorado kind of vibes."
Aviation reporter Taylor Rains said it smelled "like my grandfather just got home from the poker room after a night out." (On the bright side, she noted, "the bottle's really cute.")
Another editor said the smell embodied "20-something regret" and "bad decisions."
Senior tech correspondent Meghan Morris said the scent was the equivalent of a wine she once tried that had "notes of horse hair" in it, which she promptly poured down the drain.
There were a couple of advocates
Though most people didn't take to the smell, a small contingent of staffers liked it.
Maddie Berg, a senior editor on the tech and trending news desk, smiled after sniffing the paper. "I think it smells good," she said. "It smells like someone who'd been at a campfire and working the farm or something. Like a burly country man."
Another editor described the smell as "airy" and "cotton fresh" and added that she sensed notes of "sandalwood."
Some people thought it was spot-on
The premise of our unscientific exercise was to determine whether Burnt Hair stayed true to its promise, which was to conjure feelings of repugnant desire through the scent of burning hair. To that end there were a couple of staffers who thought the scent was as advertised.
Brad Davis, director of business news, took a whiff and grimaced. "What is it made of?" he asked. "It's pretty gross…It does smell like burnt hair." He then began parsing through the list of ingredients (the official ingredients list on the packaging is "denatured alcohol, aqua, parfum, and isoeugenol").
Transportation reporter Tim Levin agreed.
"It smells like they mixed something burnt with actual perfume — something about it smells like an actual fragrance but something about it smells like it's on fire."
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