Introducing ‘bacōn,’ the cologne for men who want to smell like fried pork

It’s a sign of the Aporklypse. A Chicago man has introduced a wearable, bacon-scented fragrance called “bacōn” that captures the essence of greasy Sunday-morning breakfasts.

One-ounce bottles of bacōn, pronounced “bay-cone,” sell for $36 and can be ordered at the product’s website, fargginay.com. The unisex line comes in Gold and Classic, offering bold and subtle bacon scents, respectively.

Bacōn, the scent for discerning pork lovers, was introduced last week by a Chicago entrepreneur. One-ounce bottles sell for $36.

The creator of the scent, John Leydon, soon hopes to have bacōn sold in fine department stores around the country.

“My ambition is to be in high-end retailers,” Leydon, 44, said in a phone interview with AOL News. “You’ll never walk into Spencer’s Gifts and see this product. It’s too classy.”

Leydon, 44, a self-described “serial entrepreneur,” came up with the idea for bacōn over two decades ago when he was sitting alone in a Parisian cafe and overheard two Frenchmen discussing their love of bacon. A bacon lover himself, he injected himself into the conversation, and they asked him if he had ever heard of the legend of John Fargginay.

He hadn’t.

Fargginay, they said, was an early 20th-century Parisian butcher who bottled a bacon-scented fragrance that reputedly triggered “pleasant memories,” becoming a coveted item among heads of state and movie stars.

Alas, the men added, the formula was lost in a fire on July 4, 1924.

Though an Internet search reveals no information about a Parisian butcher named John Fargginay, Leydon appears untroubled by facts.

“Is the legend of Fargginay real?” he asks. “We certainly think so. Are you going to find anything out there? I don’t know.”

After the Paris conversation, he forgot about bacon fragrance. It wasn’t until 11 years ago, while having dinner with friends, that he decided to bring Fargginay’s creation back from obscurity.

“I just put together the words ‘bacon,’ ‘cologne’ and ‘perfume,’ ” Leydon recalls, “and for whatever reason, I just almost fell off my chair. I was just laughing so hard about the concept. At that moment, I decided it was time to resurrect the legend of Fargginay.”

Over the next 10 years, he worked with eight different perfume houses to try to get the scent right. Nothing quite sizzled, though.

Then, last year, he met Bruce Garlick, chief perfumer at Atlanta-based Arylessence. According to Leydon, Garlick and his staff played around with a few dozen prototypes and eventually “just nailed it.”

The winning formula was one that contained black pepper and bergamot, a sweet, inedible citrus, in the top note and largely buried the bacon in the bottom note.

“The bacon scent is present in the top note through the bottom note,” Garlick told AOL News. “The novelty, though, is how it’s interwoven into a contemporary, wearable fragrance.”

Aside from its novelty, bacōn served Garlick with a whiff of irony, as well.

“I had some hesitations about creating something that makes you smell like cooking bacon,” Garlick explained, “because one of the things that we do here at Arylessence is make air fresheners for the kitchen that neutralize the odor of cooking bacon.”

Bacōn hit the market just last week, and Leydon says he’s already received more orders than he can handle. He adds that retailers have lined up to carry bacōn on their shelves.

Among the public, however, the notion of bacon-scented perfume has played to a mixed crowd. While some have panned bacōn as a gimmick — or an elaborate hoax — others are keeping an open mind.

“As great as bacon tastes,” said Rachel Cooper, a New York City account executive, in an email to AOL News, “I wouldn’t want the scent to be associated with me. It would undermine my ability to be an independent woman, valued for my intelligence. At the end of the day, I would still smell like a ‘piece of meat.’ ”

Mark McLaughlin, a marketing director in Davenport, Iowa, is allergic to many musk and floral perfumes. He thinks bacōn might be a keeper on his dresser.

“It’s about time somebody came up with a perfume that was meat-based,” McLaughlin said via email. “I’m not allergic to meat! Plus, what can be more appetizing than the sweet, smoky tang of sizzling bacon?”

Only time will tell whether bacōn becomes a hit in the fragrance departments or just another bacon novelty product along the lines of bacon-flavored toothpaste, dental floss, toothpicks, lip balm, mints and chewing gum.