Look up 4711 on Wikipedia, not that it necessarily means it's true.
Pinaud is a venerable men's grooming company, having been established — if you believe the label — in 1810 by French perfumer Edouard Pinaud. But since Pinaud himself wasn't born until sometime around that year, one assumes a bit of poetic license is being taken by the brand. He also soon bought the Legrand Parfume House, established in 1810 and thus lending him his new date of founding (something common, again, among whiskey distillers and, perhaps not oddly, academic universities). Still, it's been around for a long time. Pinaud opened his first shop in Paris in 1830, and in 1833 his “lilac vegetal†product became so popular with the Emperor Napoleon that the ruler had Pinaud appointed “Royal Parfumer,†and the company's Lilac Vegetal after-shave became the official facial pick-me-up of the Hungarian cavalry. Never mind that Napoleon had died in 1821, and that Napoleon III, while alive at the time, wasn't in France and didn't have much of anything to do with Hungary's cavalrymen. But what can you do? Let truth get in the way of a good story?
