CK One Scandalized Your Parents. Amazon Is Selling It at a Price They Can’t Resist

For more cologne deals—including a rare discount on CK One—start here. For every other worthwhile bargain we’ve found, check our ongoing master list of the best Prime Day Deals so far.

Ask a group of ’90s kids to tell you what the decade smelled like, and they’ll name-drop the same scent: Calvin Klein’s CK One, a playful, citrusy fragrance that upended the industry forever. That isn’t hyperbole—when CK One landed on shelves in 1994, it was explicitly marketed as unisex, a then-risky ploy that could’ve easily doomed it from the start.

Three decades and many millions of dollars later, CK One is the rarest type of success, a genuinely groundbreaking scent that continues to win over die-hard fragrance nerds and folks who struggle to pronounce “chypre”, let alone explain it. As of this morning, though, every person along that spectrum has reason to breathe a little easier: thanks to Amazon Prime Day, CK One is 25% cheaper than usual.

Calvin Klein

CK One Eau de Toilette

CK One, the now-canonical ‘90s-era unisex scent, was always going to be a hit. Its remarkable run—and endlessly huffable mix of musk, lemon, and jasmine—has spawned a generation of copycats, but the original formula still sets the standard.

To understand why even a small discount here is a big deal, it helps to know what skyrocketed CK One to the top of the fragrance charts to begin with. “By any metric,” Adam Hurly, GQ’s roving fragrance guru, says, CK One “is the unisex cologne.” Part of that boils down to sheer marketing ingenuity—the stark black-and-white Steven Meisel campaigns remain legendary—but the hullabaloo surrounding the product would be totally irrelevant if the scent itself wasn’t, uh, up to sniff. Good news on that front: It was, is, and forever will be.

When a bottle of CK One circulated around GQ HQ recently, its fragrance notes—pineapple and bergamot, nutmeg and violet, sandalwood and oak moss—elicited plenty of knowing, appreciative sniffs. But what really captures CK One’s decades-spanning appeal is the sheer variety of folks doing the sniffing, from wide-eyed Zoomers too young to remember the fragrance’s early buzz, to young-at-heart Boomers too old in the ‘90s to have cared.

Over 30 years after its debut, CK One—photographed here in the clandestine GQ testing studio—remains the quintessentials unisex scent, a no-brainer buy from the first name in American luxury minimalism.