Baccarat Rouge 540 (Eau de Parfum) by Maison Francis Kurkdjian

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Baccarat Rouge 540

Baccarat Rouge 540 Maison Francis Kurkdjian 2016 Eau de Parfum

Ranked 40 in Unisex Perfume

7.7 / 10 4967 Ratings

A popular perfume by Maison Francis Kurkdjian for women and men, released in 2016. The scent is sweet-woody. Projection and longevity are above-average. It is being marketed by LVMH.
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Main accords

Sweet

Woody

Spicy

Synthetic

Floral

Fragrance Notes

Saffron

Ambroxan

Hedione

Virginia cedar

Perfumer

Francis Kurkdjian

Videos

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Ratings

Scent

7.74967 Ratings

Longevity

8.74648 Ratings

Sillage

8.54600 Ratings

Bottle

8.34444 Ratings

Value for money

6.43567 Ratings

Submitted by OPomone · last update on 02/15/2026.

Source-backed & verified

Interesting Facts

The fragrance is part of the Baccarat Rouge 540 collection.

Smells similar

What the fragrance is similar to

Baccarat Rouge 540 Extrait de Parfum

Belle Icône

Trajan

Red Temptation Women Eau de Parfum

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Ana Abiyedh Rouge Eau de Parfum

Tinharé

Reviews

347 in-depth fragrance descriptions

02/14/2016

3Scent 10Longevity 8Sillage

Drseid
828 Reviews

Drseid

Helpful Review 8

Play The Game, Avoid This Luxury Crystal Maker Inspired Perfume...

Baccarat Rouge 540 opens with a brief dash of saffron spice infused dulled orange before quickly moving to its heart. As the composition enters its early heart, the orange morphs to a vague, slightly transparent and relatively sweet fruity floral jasmine accord, as powerful woody amber takes on the starring role, with significant powdery oakmoss and fir balsam support. During the late dry-down the composition remains highly linear as the powder infused woody amber continues to control sans the jasmine and sweetness, now with mild cedarwood support through the finish. Projection is very good to excellent and longevity outstanding at nearly 24 hours on skin.

What a stinker Baccarat Rouge 540 is. I knew in seconds I would detest this composition, and sadly after a couple full wearings on skin my opinion hasn't changed. The initial dulled orange is tolerable, but that only lasts five seconds before the composition turns cloyingly sweet from the woody amber, and extremely powdery from an unpleasant and poorly implemented oakmoss and fir balsam tandem that is suffocating to the powder averse like this writer. As the composition is highly linear, things don't change much all the way through the finish, letting the nose torture continue on and on... and on. In truth, there really isn't anything I can say positive about the composition's smell as it is all bad, really. At least on the flip-side for those perfume warriors that can tolerate wearing this scary stuff, the performance metrics, especially longevity, are absolutely outstanding. So if you are insistent on wearing an early "worst new perfume of 2016" candidate (at least easily to the nose of this writer), you will live with this stuff all day and all night without any fear of it wearing off. The bottom line is Baccarat Rouge 540 may seem like a relative bargain at its current selling price of $300 per 70ml bottle (as it originally was sold as a 250 piece limited edition in a fancy Baccarat crystal bottle for an eye popping $4000), but in truth $3 is paying too much for this "poor" to "very poor" 1 to 1.5 stars out of 5 rated horror. Spending your $300 at the baccarat *table* is a better investment.

06/21/2016

jtd
484 Reviews

jtd

Top Review 5

game of chance

Kurkdjian excels at creating well turned-out perfumes. Smooth, seamless perfumes with lovely olfactory shapes and pleasant profiles. Of course, he also makes Cologne and Absolue pour le Soir, two of the dirtiest roses available, so he’s not limited to olfactory pleasantry. Still, most of the Maison Francis Kurkdjian perfumes have a mannered quality. Where various perfume lines promise Arabian fantasy or minimalism or narrative, MFK offers the comfort of normalcy. Only better. MFK gives us the mainstream, but with a perfection that negates the inherent dullness found in middle of the road.

Take the Amyrises. They are luxe versions of what you might find on the department store fragrance counters at any given moment—they are designed to be. They might not draw your attention at a distance, but up close the fit looks just too good to be off-the-rack. They balance a prim detachment with a wink to let you know that there’s more here than just an idealized designer perfume.

Baccarat shares the refined, muted quality of the Amyrises but not their designer style. It is more abstract and uncluttered. The polish, the precious-metal glow that many of Kurkdjian’s perfumes have is there, but the shape is less conventional. It riffs on a mainstream sensibility, but less so than the Amyrises.

The opening of the perfume matches the the nearly-fruity scent of fir to a juicy orange but cuts the sweetness with a mineral edge. The saltiness and a cotton-candy note circle each other, yet Baccarat 540 skips the lingering caramel predictability of the current run of praline perfumes. The specific notes seem to recede over time as large olfactory images come into focus. A marine/ambergris shape gives a balanced, synthetic profile to the heartnotes. The sweet/nutty pairing holds together through the drydown giving a cozy coherence from top to bottom.

Unusual? Yes.

Edgy? Not in the least.

Interesting? Try it and see.

01/24/2026

All4You
16 Reviews

All4You

Helpful Review 4

MY HONEST REVIEW, ONLY READ IF YOU WANT TRUTH

Baccarat Rouge 540 smells like the exact moment your grandmother stopped recognizing your face, that flicker of confusion crystallized into sugar and set on fire, the scent of beautiful deterioration, of synapses misfiring in expensive patterns, and I need to tell you what happened in the laboratory where they made this because nobody else will and the truth tastes like burnt caramel and medical waste if you're brave enough to let it sit on your tongue like a communion wafer soaked in formaldehyde and kerosene. The perfumer didn't use jasmine—he used the last exhale of a coma patient who'd been dreaming in color for seven years, dreaming of weddings that never happened and children who were never born, and when they pulled the plug her breath came out smelling like saffron and regret and they captured it in a bottle before her husband could stop crying long enough to notice that death had accidentally become marketable, had become the kind of beautiful you could charge three hundred dollars for and people would line up around the block to smell like the end of things.
The sillage follows you like a ghost that hasn't realized it's dead yet, like the phantom limb of someone who lost their arms in an accident but can still feel their fingers moving through dimensions that don't have names in any language spoken by the living, and here's where it gets twisted, here's where the story stops being about perfume and starts being about the slow American rot we've been breathing since birth, the kind that smells like cotton candy and prosperity and the inside of a funeral home that's trying too hard to make grief feel luxurious. This fragrance is what happens when you take everything wrong with wanting and distill it down to its most seductive form, when you realize that addiction doesn't need to smell like basement meth labs and desperation—it can smell like this, like expensive jasmine and burnt sugar, like the moment before someone does something unforgivable and calls it self-actualization, calls it freedom, calls it anything except what it really is which is the smell of a country that confused consumption with salvation and started mainlining it through department store atomizers.
This is what wealth smells like when it forgets why it wanted to live, when the trust fund baby realizes the money won't stop the cells from dying but it will make the dying smell like caramelized amber and dental cotton soaked in something that costs more per ounce than the medication that might have saved her, might have stopped the tumor from eating her memories one birthday party at a time until all that was left was the muscle memory of smiling for photographs she'd never remember taking. The cotton candy note isn't nostalgia—it's weaponized innocence, it's the smell of childhood before you knew what sugar was really doing to your brain chemistry, before you understood that the state fair was just training for a lifetime of chasing sweetness that evaporates the moment it touches your tongue and leaves nothing but the aftertaste of wanting more, always more, until wanting becomes your entire personality and the perfume is the only thing holding you together.
I wore this to my uncle's wake and three people asked me what I had on before they lowered the casket, and I didn't know whether to laugh or scream because the scent was eating the grief right out of the air, was turning mourning into something you could buy at Neiman Marcus if you wanted your sadness to have good sillage, wanted your loss to smell like a luxury hotel lobby at three in the morning when the night shift is vacuuming around the passed-out businessmen and everything smells clean and wrong and expensive in a way that makes you understand why people jump from high windows, why they reach for things they know will destroy them simply because those things shimmer, simply because beauty and annihilation started holding hands somewhere around 1969 and never let go.
The amberwood in this isn't wood at all—it's the calcified tears of every mother who buried a child and survived it, survived the unsurvivable, and the chemist ground those tears into powder and called it a base note, called it warmth, called it anything except what it really was which is the smell of going on living when you shouldn't have to, when every morning you wake up and the world has the audacity to smell this good, this clean, this utterly without mercy or meaning. Spray it on and smell like inherited trauma reformulated as luxury, like the moment between flatline and acceptance rendered in aldehydes that sparkle exactly the way her eyes used to before the dementia took everything except her ability to say your name wrong with absolute conviction, with the kind of certainty that makes you wonder if maybe she's right, maybe you've been lying about who you are this whole time and she's the only one brave enough to call you out on it while her brain dissolves into expensive-smelling fog.
This fragrance is the olfactory equivalent of watching someone you love become a beautiful stranger while standing in a country that's been dead for decades but hasn't stopped moving yet, hasn't stopped smelling good, hasn't stopped pretending that if we just buy the right things and spray on the right scents we can somehow postpone the reckoning that's been coming since we decided prosperity was a substitute for meaning and cologne was a replacement for character. The perfumer's hands were shaking when he finished the formula because he knew what he'd created, knew it was beautiful and wrong in equal measure, knew that people would buy it by the liter and spray it on before job interviews and first dates and funerals, would use it to mask the smell of desperation and student loans and the creeping suspicion that the whole enterprise was a con and we were the marks, had always been the marks, would die being the marks while smelling like jasmine and saffron and the particular kind of woody amber that only exists in laboratories where they've figured out how to make extinction smell appealing.
And you'll buy it, won't you? You'll stand in Sephora or Nordstrom or wherever it is people go to purchase their delusions at retail price, and you'll spray it on your wrist and feel something shift inside you, something that recognizes the scent even though you've never smelled it before, recognizes it the way animals recognize the smell of predators, the way your grandmother's brain recognized that something was wrong even as it forgot everything else, and you'll buy it anyway because the alternative is admitting that you knew all along what you were paying for, knew it was the smell of the American Dream after it stopped dreaming and started sleepwalking through shopping malls, knew it was cotton candy rendered carcinogenic, knew it was sweetness with a body count, knew it was exactly what you deserved for wanting to smell like heaven while refusing to acknowledge you've been living in purgatory since birth, spraying it on thick enough to mask the truth, thick enough to make beautiful extinction something you could wear to brunch.

Dying never felt so alive, and smelling like the history of martyrs and denizens of hell.

05/07/2025

9Scent 10Longevity 10Sillage

Omnipotato
485 Reviews

Omnipotato

Helpful Review 7

Artistry in minimalism

Baccarat Rouge 540 is like Nirvana (the band, not the concept in Buddhism). Even if you don't like it, you have to admit that it was massively influential and ushered in a new era of perfumery.

I personally find it wonderful, and a real "unisex" fragrance. Of course, fragrance doesn't have gender, but what was done here was a meshing of traditional feminine and masculine notes perfectly: ambroxan and oakmoss on one side, and floral notes and sweet notes on the other. And these 4 descriptors are pretty much the entire fragrance — quite literally.

If you are not aware, and I think even many die-hard fragheads are not, Baccarat Rouge 540 is a combination of pretty much just 4 very cheap aromachemicals: ambroxan, hedione (a light floral scent), veramoss (a synthetic oakmoss), and ethyl maltol (a sharp, sweet scent). There are a couple of saffron aromachemicals (safranal, safraleine) at very low concentrations, but that's pretty much it. This is what makes it such an easy base to build upon. You can add some oud to it and you get Oud for Greatness Eau de Parfum. Add some leather and you get Spirito Fiorentino.

A lot of people might consider it unfair in some way that such cheap juice commands such high prices, but I don't. The price should be based on the artistry and skill required to make the composition, not the addition of the price of all the materials that it takes to make it. A painting is worth much more than the paints used and the canvas it sits on. After all, folks pay hundreds for Molecule 01 or Molecule 02, and while that is more extreme minimalism, I actually appreciate the minimalism in BR540 more. It's an actual composition, a scent with development and character, that even manages to appeal to both men and women, and be utterly unique. It's unfortunate that women have sort of co-opted this one for themselves, as I think men would really enjoy it if it weren't for the societal connotation nowadays that this is a women's perfume. And it doesn't smell like anything else. Not even remotely like anything found in nature; it's what I call an "abstract" perfume like Ganymede Eau de Parfum where it is not necessarily meant to invoke anything in particular, just be a great scent.

For me, Baccarat Rouge 540 is bigger than "I like it" or "I don't like it." It's important to the history and heritage of perfumery. I personally can't stand N°5 Parfum, but I can't deny its sheer importance and magnitude. In a few decades, people will undoubtedly say the same about Baccarat Rouge 540.

06/26/2023

10Scent 8Longevity 8Sillage

NoirAlethea
1 Review

NoirAlethea

Helpful Review 7

What black magic is this?

Due to the way BR540 makes me feel, I can only imagine that FK exchanged his soul for the formula. Some people are immune but I am completely under its devilish spell.

How is it possible that the listed notes can be combined in a way that smells childlike, forresty, delux and sugary but still unisex? I imagine that on the day that FK passes (many, many years from now) the pact will have been fulfilled and we ALL will just smell bandaids and dental offices. Until then I will remain captivated.

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