Comme des Garçons: Original

A good ten years before I started collecting perfume in earnest, I visited New York, and made a stop at Barney's. I'd always loved perfume but I didn't wear it much, if ever. I had an old bottle of Coriandre and a few other things, and I kept these in the bathroom cabinet, back when there was room to do such a thing. I'm not sure what I was doing at Barney's, or why I felt it necessary to go - but Comme des Garçons had just come out, and it was heavily represented on the first floor, and there wasn't much time wasted between smelling it and purchasing it.

A few years later, I gave my practically full bottle away. A friend really loved it, and it was hard to make an argument with myself for keeping it, given I never wore it. Several years later, once I had quite a few fragrances, so much that there was no more room in the bathroom cabinet, I was in said friend's bathroom and saw my old bottle of Comme des Garçons sitting there on the counter. I smelled it again and tried to remember why I'd thought it rational in any way to part with it. Within a few weeks I'd purchased another bottle online.

Marc Buxton created this fragrance in 1994, and while there might have been a few things like it at the time, I'd never smelled them. Intensely woody and spicy, Comme des Garçons explores now standard territory for niche (and even mainstream) perfumery - CDG itself has investigated nearly every facet represented here in its own range of perfumes since - and yet, nearly fifteen years later, the fragrance smells entirely new each time I smell it.

Interviewed upon its release, Buxton spoke of the freedom he was given - and the responsibility that came with it. Given carte blanche creatively, he was limited only by his conviction that the fragrance should be something one could, and would want to, wear. It is wearable, but also stratifying. The alleged medicinal aspects of Comme des Garçons waver on a line that divides opinion. That said, this is no Secretions Magnifiques. I say alleged because I've never gotten any such medicinal thing smelling it. I get woods (sandalwood, cedar), spices (cardamom, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, coriander), incense (frankincense), honey, and something which conjures rose. The overall impression for me is something as boozy and illicit as a prohibition speakeasy - a little wood, a little leather, the sense of something you wear with the intent of getting yourself into some trouble.

Comme des Garçons is long lasting but not hugely diffusive on me. It falls into a category I have no name for in my collection but which includes Black Cashmere, L'Air du Desert Marocain, Yatagan, Norma Kamali Incense, Monk, Moschino de Moschino, and Jubilation XXV, among others. What is that category, exactly? You'd have to tell me. When I feel like what CDG has to offer, nothing else, not Lutens, Montale, the Incense Series, or even any other fragrance in this loose category will do. Of all the interesting things Marc Buxton has done, this remains my favorite.

Fendi, "For Women"

With so many of the greats set for discontinuation, it probably seems silly to wax nostalgic about the original Fendi, which was discontinued all the way back in 2005, before any of the crippling restrictions went into effect. Even recently extinct Palazzo is a more practical cause celebre.  Still, before I'd ever heard anything about Guerlain or Givenchy, I was spending what seemed like a fortune at the time (1985) for a bottle of Fendi eau de toilette. It was one of the first perfumes I ever bought, and though it was intended for women and owning it would give me some explaining to do, I couldn't help myself. I had to have it.

I've always been a sucker for a good wood smoke fragrance, which is what I took Fendi to be. I had no idea what was actually in it.  I only knew they sold it in the women's department, and that I loved it beyond reason. Now I know the pyramid: cardamom, coriander, bergamot, mandarin, laurel leaves, lily-of-the-valley, geranium, cypress, cedar, moss, labdanum, tonka. What's most remarkable about this incredibly potent perfume--potent even among its eighties sisters--is how devoid of floral notes it is. What, even then, made it feminine? It has less florals than most of today's men's colognes. Dior Homme is far more floral than Fendi, but so are less overtly flowery male fragrances.

Smelling Fendi now, years after first purchasing it, I'm able to examine it a lot more closely, a little more out in the open, and I realize it really isn't a wood smoke fragrance either, not officially, not exactly.  It smells leathery, with incense undertones, a pronounced herbal influence, and spices.  The spices, of course, aren't polite.  Cardamom gives Fendi a piercing, camphorous quality, a touch of resinous warmth; coriander magnifies the combustibility, reinforcing the overall terpenoid character.

As it turns out, Fendi has a lot more in common with masculines than feminines, a disposition signaled by the advertisement, which depicted a woman snuggling up to Michelangelo's David, perhaps her inner male.  Fendi is closer to aromatic fragrances like Kouros (geranium, coriander, laurel), Trussardi (laurel, geranium, tonka, landanum), and Paco Rabanne (tonka, geranium, laurel) than Poison, Giorgio, or Paris.  Several years later, Fendi would affirm this by producing Fendi Uomo, a more officially masculine variation on the women's fragrance, close enough in spirit that the two might as well have been brothers.

Both EDT and EDP require a light touch.  Fendi EDP is a little less overtly smoky to my nose, but the dry down comes very close to what you get in the EDT.  Both have off the chart longevity.  Comparisons have been made to balsamic orientals like Youth Dew, Bal a Versailles, and Opium, but Fendi is nowhere close to keeping that company.  It has no fruity embellishments and, as mentioned, no discernible floral backbone.  Granted, Youth Dew is no delicate flower itself, but Fendi is butcher still, and maybe even ahead of its time.  Ten years younger, it relates very clearly to the original Comme des Garçons by Marc Buxton (geranium, cardamom, coriander, nutmeg, labdanum, cedarwood) and it has more than a little in common with Comme des Garçons 2 Man, as well, also by Buxton.  Michael Edwards classifies Fendi as a floral chypre, which seems a bit of a stretch.  Still, though not listed, oakmoss is in the basenotes, and lily of the valley IS, after all, a flower.  Fendi is still available online.  I would love to know who created it. 

Alain Delon's Iquitos

There's a certain logic, if not sense, to the complicated but efficient machinery behind most celebrity fragrances. After the marketing department finishes, Curious or Midnight Fantasy become, somewhere in the imaginations of their consumers, bottled essence of Britney Spears. Deseo and J-lo Glo are thought to embody the allegedly tempestuous spirit of their iconic Latina-American reason for being, as if containing something like civet oil, scraped from the mystery regions of the legendarily ample derriere la Lopez. Mariah Carey is a butterfly, slightly cheap, like the one adorning the bottle of "M". Lovely, at least, is true to its name, trading on Sarah Jessica Parker's racy Sex and the City character, Carrie Bradshaw, without sacrificing the well-intentioned, old fashioned earnestness which is believed to characterize Parker's offscreen persona.

As far as purity of intent, Alain Delon has more in common with Parker than, say, Celine Dion. His star, especially in France, shines brightly, and in fact he still releases fragrances for men and women, but his earliest efforts, much admired and in a few cases obsessively collected ("guilty"), have been discontinued. Unlike most every celebrity fragrance you can think of, Iquitos (1985), one of Delon's best, would appear to be completely antithetical in almost every conceivable way with the star's popular image.

Early on, he specialized in arrogant hubris. In Purple Noon, he became the first, mostly shirtless cinematic iteration of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley. For Visconti, he played one of Rocco and His Brothers. A self-absorbed twenty-something opposite blank-faced Monica Vitti in Antonioni's The Eclipse, he was visibly contemptuous of her extravagantly placid angst, though without bothering to raise an eyebrow himself. Vitti was a static presence, idling through the movie as if slumped on a conveyor belt before rear screen projection. Delon, though expressively minimalist, was gymnastically cagey, impatient for action, opportunity, sexual intercourse, or whatever else came lumbering into his orbit. Tanned to a color home product catalogues might christen Smoldered Coco, surly in a way only the French have mastered, he exuded a chilling, cryptic moral ambivalence you felt uncomfortable finding yourself attracted to. Later, he played cops and gangsters, expressionless, callous killers in French neo-noirs like Flic Story, Le Cercle Rouge, and Le Samourai.

Where Delon was known for brooding tough guys, sleek like a cat but tortured, perverse and emotionally precarious, Iquitos, go figure, is forcefully lush and unequivocally androgynous, so uncomplicated about itself and its intentions that you assume it must be what it initially seems to be, a routine, straightforward variation of rose. It isn't--anymore than Delon was a typical matinee idol. In his prime, he was once called the male Brigitte Bardot--and not for any lisping hints of femininity. His charisma, conflating the gendered codes of sexual appeal, bridged the male/female divide, as does Iquitos. More aptly, he made the male in you feel like having sex with your female side, leaving you to watch like a panting voyeur. Surely many men wanted to be Alain Delon, if only to experience what it would be like to be that beautiful. IN a way, Iquitos provides this opportunity.

Iquitos opens big with cardamom and ginger. Not many fragrances can pull off the latter, and stumble through the attempt like a girl in her mother's high heels. Not so Iquitos, which walks a straight line in them (and in a suit!). There are green and citrus notes as well, and a breathtakingly pretty jasmine. The greens (most noticeably, vetiver) are packed down in damp soil. Aldehydes lend a projectile dimensionality to the rose. Patchouli darkens it, giving it a slightly grungy, woody aspect, a moodiness. This rose has a fair amount of stealth to it, growing earthier and denser as it dries down into its sandalwood, civet and leather foundation.

Rumors has it that Marc Buxton, the perfumer responsible for many of the Comme des Garçons fragrances which established that line's reputation, created Iquitos. It's a compelling theory, especially in light of Jil Sander's Scent 79 Man, another Buxton creation, released in 2008. 79 shares with Iquitos a certain quiet but robust formal elegance, balancing woody with floral in a way Buxton has made his own. Many imitate the effect. Few improve upon it. Add to this the fact that Buxton is known to have composed at least one other Delon fragrance, Delon Pour Homme.

Iquitos is a fantastic masculine which gives new meaning to the term, tossing the letters around. From masculine to..."lean music"? Or "lace in sum", perhaps. It was discontinued and is increasingly harder to find, so I'm relieved to own two bottles. It's an uncommonly brooding, intensely unique fragrance which would make perfect sense on either gender. And it lasts.

Two or Three Scents I've Put in Heavy Rotation Lately

Jil Sander: Scent 79 Woman/Man

Not so distantly related to Chanel No. 19, Scent 79 Woman is a marvel on the skin, balancing fruit (cranberry, peach) and what smells like galbanum against may rose, jasmine, and iris in perfect proportion.  The fragrance lasts forever, not just on the skin but in the 4.2 oz, Noguchi-like bottle, a white, bifurcated block of glass.  Everything about Scent 79 Woman is

 great.  Even the box is unusual, oversized and imposing, a real treat to open up.  The bottle rests inside like a Matryoshka doll.  Scent 79 is quite different, but recalls, for me, Krizia Moods, too.  Moods seems to use linden against fruity elements in a similar way, though animalic notes weigh it down, anchoring it in darker territory, whereas Scent 79 Woman is bright and cheerful, on the surface at least.  It has an interesting, edgy tension.

Scent 79 Man stays much closer to the skin but lasts just as impressively as its sister.  Again, there's a wonderfully unlikely balance, from bottom to top.  The literature on Scent 79 Man implies much development.  I don't experience it, but the balance itself is plenty complicated.  It's an unusual structure, closest I think to Chanel Antaeus, though, again, not animalic in the slightest.  Tobacco, faint hints of leather, angelika, clary sage and frankincense are the things I notice first.  Spending more time with the fragrance, I get the jasmine, violet and iris.  The perfumer behind Man is Marc Buxton. 79 Man is EDP and also 4.2 oz, the bottle black to Woman's white.  Both are available at Neiman Marcus and well worth the 90 bucks. 

Paloma Picasso: Tentations

Months back, I took home a 5 ml sample of Tentations from the local Korean-owned discount fragrance store.  They had many discontinued items but Tentations wasn't one of them.  The sample smelled somewhat off to me and at first I didn't like it.  I felt I should have it, because it's discontinued and it's Sophia Grojsman, whom I love, but doubted I'd buy a full bottle even if one were available.  I couldn't really see any similarities between Tentations and Grojsman's more widely known work, like Paris, or even her more relatively obscure scents, like, say, Yvresse.  A few days ago, I visited the Russian-owned perfume kiosk at the mall and discovered two bottles of Tentations.  Smelling it, I knew instantly that I'd been right about the sample, but it wasn't as far off as I'd imagined it must be.  Truth is, Tentations opens on a weird little medley of notes including peach, pepper, and orange blossom.  Under that you can smell, most immediately, carnation and cinnamon.  The combination of peach and pepper is odd and intriguing, lovelier than you think it could be.  The addition of cinnamon is weirder still.  Carnation only makes things more peppery.  I love Tentations, its rich but subtle spices and the way it plays out quietly on the skin, and I'm baffled why it didn't thrive, where other Grojsman scents, much louder, have demonstrated remarkable longevity in the marketplace.  Tentations, I also realized, is distinctly in keeping with Grosjman's other work.  The peach recalls Yvresse.  The carnation, Elizabeth Taylor's Diamonds and Rubies.  The spices put it right alongside Spellbound, which seems in some ways like Tentations jacked up on steroids.  Like the majority of Grojsman's scents, Tentations lasts well.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Comme des Garçons

People love to decry the death of something they once loved which has, by their estimation, subsequently jumped the shark. Thus, the "end of the novel", the "decline of the movie", and the selling out of this or that beloved band. Bob Pollard of Guided by Voices fame has, according to fans and non-fans alike, sold out at least five times to date. No one reads anymore because books aren't well written. No one watches movies because they suck. Artists can sell out. Filmmakers, politicians--even hoteliers. It's only ever one bad move away.

There's always some defining moment, some compass point by which to pinpoint the exact transition from great to god-awful. On The Brady Bunch, it was a trip to Hawaii. Fonzie literally jumped the shark, via waterskis, on Happy Days. The sellout-resistant band ultimately welcomes sponsorship from Starbucks. Toward the end, Will and Grace started peppering episodes with lazy turns by famous guest stars. The people who determine the exact point at which something jumps shark usually have high standards, a bottom line which becomes the final straw. Their expectations are disappointed and they can't make adjustments any longer. Hard core fans, they have definite ideas about the way things should go with their favorite group, TV show, celebrity, or cereal. Increasingly, perfume aficionados have joined these ranks, a migration which makes sense, given how educated, articulate, and cultured many of perfume's biggest followers are.

L'Artisan, to some, is walking thin ice. It's the whole persistence thing. The prices went up last year, and yet the longevity continues to go down. Some will excuse L'Artisan for as long as humanly possible, hoping that the company will consider its fans and do something to turn this around. Lutens has done its own dance with the shark, producing, for every Iris Silver Mist, a Miel de Bois and a Serge Noire. The commercial houses disappoint so regularly, are so generally inconsistent that their inconsistency becomes the one thing to rely on. Others (niche lines, typically) set the bar so high that even when they fall short and are way above average in effort and accomplishment they can seem more like dismal failures.

Comme des Garçons has practically defined the concept of conceptual perfumery over the last fifteen years or so, but their project began with fashion. The clothing line was started as a women's label in 1969 by designer Rei Kawakubo. It was established as a company in 1973. By 1978, a men's line was added. Over its first several decades, Comme des Garçons (translation: "like the boys") pushed the fashion envelope in almost every conceivable way, distressing, tearing, fraying, and puncturing fabric, dissolving or disassembling structure, fading the palette to a monochromatic black, turning ideas like "pretty" and "glamor" and "silhouette" inside out. Their mission seemed to be a total re-evaluation of the psychological underpinnings of fashion, with an emphasis on, as Kawakubo herself put it, "breaking down the barriers between art and fashion." The 1997 collection, which came to be known as the "lumps and bumps" line, advanced a destabilization of traditional forms of beauty and form. More recently, in 2006, the label presented a collection on the theme of "Persona", mixing feminine and masculine elements to explore how we define ourselves through gendered dress codes and rigorously enforced social attitudes about self-presentation.

The first Comme des Garçons fragrance was released in 1994. It was a woods and spice eau de parfum in a now iconic flattened oblong brown bottle designed by Kawakubo and Marc Atlan. The juice was composed by Marc Buxton, who had just done Dalissime for Salvador Dali and Pasha for Cartier. The original CDG perfume has spawned so many imitators that one easily forgets how truly avante garde it was at the time and, to some extent, still is. The following year, a flanker, called White, was released, adding to the initial formula a strong floral quotient and the fruity influence of pomegranate.

In 1998, CDG released Odeur 53, the first in a series of "anti-perfumes". It was the company's boldest fragrance assertion yet, the first to match the irreverently off-kilter spirit of the clothes. Composed of 53 non-traditional notes (flash of metal, sand dunes, nail polish, and so forth) the "scent" questioned what constitutes a perfume in much the same way the clothes challenged what it is to be a shirt or a dress. Clothes, Kawakubo has always seemed to say, serve not just a cosmetic but a social function. What happens if they are liberated from this responsibility? Who says a skirt has to look like a skirt? How far can you take a skirt before it isn't one at all? Odeur 53 asked similar questions, much to many people's consternation. An abstract floral seeks to replicate known natural entities with unknown or unfamiliar ingredients, often synthetic. Odeur 53 went further, arguably in the opposite direction, creating an abstract banal. Rather than conceal the synthetic aspects of its composition, 53 embraced them, proposing scent as a Brechtian exercise.

After Odeur 53 CDG presented ever more ambitious propositions. Comme des Garçons 2 (1999) evoked flowers without employing many. The logo was rendered in the squiggly line of a ballpoint pen, while the scent itself recalled the inky aroma of the childhood classroom and the theoretical outdoors. Like the bottle, a variation on the original flat oblong, the juice shimmered with metallic sheen, reflecting and distorting various associative impressions like a sleek funhouse mirror. 2 took its cues from an object or evocation the same way other perfumes did, but where their departure points were flowers, spices, woods, and fruits, 2 looked to everyday objects and sense perceptions. Odeur 71 followed in these footsteps a year later, extending the experiment of 53.

The years since have been very productive for the company. What started as individual releases became multiple part exercises in conceptual perfumery, starting with the Leaves series: Calamus, Lily, Mint, Shiso, and Tea. All but Tea, Lily, and Calamus have since been discontinued. Series 2: Red (2001) included Carnation, Harrisa, Palisander, Sequoia, and Rose. Perhaps the most popular series, involving incense, followed. Avignon, Jaisalmer, Kyoto, Quarzazate, and Zagorsk are largely gorgeous iterations of the company's unusual sensibility, and predate the rage for incense compositions by several years. The series themselves, taken collectively, have asserted perfume as an endless resource for investigation into everything from color (red, green) to different religious chambers and states of mind from around the globe, tying the latter all together into an aromatic declaration of religious tolerance and spiritual unity, taking transcendence out of the cathedral and into the head space.

The company's increasingly ambitious exercises have produced a wider variety of hits and near misses, and everything in between, prompting some to level accusations of decline. The general consensus seems to be that the shark fin approached shortly after the incense series, though Series 5: Sherbert has as many admirers as critics. Series 6: Synthetics goes some way toward closing that gap. Series 7: Sweet seems almost universally derided. It's too early to tell with Series 8: Energy C, whose Lime, Lemon and Grapefruit seem to have been received lukewarmly at best. It's difficult just yet to situate singular scents like 2007's Play and this year's Monocle Scent 1: Hinoki and 8 88 within the CDG oeuvre. Though they follow in the footsteps of earlier CDG fragrances, they depart from the "Series" Series, sticking out sore-thumb-like. A few of the company's smaller series (mini-series, if you will) have been charged with the blame of bringing the line's heyday of playful and provocative experimentation to a close, if not an imaginatively bankrupt standstill.

Guerillas 1 and 2 are named after CDG stores which sprouted up briefly in unlikely places, challenging the concept of permanence and brand stability in a world inhospitable to such things. Guerilla 1, with its meat notes and vague air of urban refuse, is often regarded as unwearable on the one hand and a tad too conventional on the other, somehow both too arty and too boring to bother with at the same time. The top opens with pear, saffron, and clove, an unforgivable offense, if not outright assault, to some. From there, insult adds to injury: the heart notes include Champaca flower and black pepper. Guerilla 1 is certainly an unusual scent. Inhaling it, the mind tries to connect it to something, filing through a mental rolodex of potential source materials. The effect is a wavering indeterminacy, a sort of way station fragrance, like the pop-up stores the scents are named after. Guerilla 1 was the brainchild of Marie-Aude Couture, whose other best known fragrance might be the previous year's Eau d'Amazonie.

Guerilla 2, by Nathalie Feisthauer, is considered the more conventional of the duo, though it's hard to see exactly why when in this case the word conventional becomes highly relative. The notes are listed as bergamot, pink pepper, ginger, red pepper, curcama, raspberry, tuberose, vetiver, cedarwood, and musk. The key word is "red". The result is tangy, tart, and somewhat savory too. The vetiver seems just the pinch of salt the affair calls for. Feisthauer has done work for Etat Libre d'Orange, another equally adventurous perfume line which arguably wouldn't exist were it not for the path CDG has forged. Both Guerillas are wearable and, though said to be more feminine than not by some, each mixes feminine and masculine attributes and impressions in ways which fit perfectly into the company's credo. Guerilla 1 has more development and seems slightly more indecipherable. But Guerilla 2 demonstrates more than a little stealth itself; hard to tell what exactly is going on in this fragrance, though it seems to know where it's going.

Of the Synthetics, I prefer Garage, which as a friend pointed out, smells like your grandparents' detached garage, with the Schwinn bike tires and the still-wet innertubes stacked in a corner, the tennis ball hanging from the ceiling to designate the stop point for parking the car, some oil on the concrete floor, some sawdust, old magazines, humidity, and vinyl. It's a wonderful evocation, with persistence like nobody's business, creating sensory memories out of thin air. Even the maligned Sweets Series has its standouts. Nomad Tea is actually one of the more unusual and enigmatic fragrances of the entire line, mixing what smells like birch tar with minty artemesia. Wood Coffee and Sticky Cake are far more compelling than they're given credit for.

Luxe Champaca and Patchouli are standouts, not just in quality but cost. They're expensive, to be sure, but Patchouli, at least, lingers so well that it might make up for it, if you give it the time. These two seem like something of an anomaly for a line which is otherwise fairly affordable and populist. Nevertheless, they open questions about what luxury means and who has access to it and in some ways they seem to indicate an exercise in irony, though it's unclear who the joke is on. One thing seems abundantly clear. Comme des Garçons is alive and well, despite claims otherwise, playing around with form and content and what it means to smell and be smelled. Recently, the company designed a line for the H & M Department Store Chain, complete with signature fragrance. This will inevitably be seen as a compromise of some kind, a watered down version of previous genius. But let's all get real: Comme des Garçons has never pretended to be anything but fake. If a shark fin is in fact circling the company's image, it's attached to a stick which Kawakubo manipulates from under the water.

Comme des Garçons 2 Man and Gucci Pour Homme

Gucci Pour Homme and Comme des Garçons 2 Men seem similar enough at first whiff that for a while now I’ve been inclined to dismiss one or the other as inevitably redundant. The similarities, as it turns out, are purely superficial.

Gucci Pour Homme was created in 2003 by Michel Almairac, the nose behind several Bond No. 9 fragrances (Bryant Park, Fire Island, Saks Fifth Avenue for Him, Scent of Peace, West Side), L’Artisan’s Voleur de Roses, Dunhill, Rochas Lui, and Casmir, among others.

Gucci can’t seem to make up its mind. How many Gucci Homme’s must there be, or is it the company's intention to confuse their consumer base? Before 2003 there was Gucci Pour Homme 1976. In 2007 Gucci Pour Homme II was released. This year, another Gucci Pour Homme has appeared, Gucci by Gucci.

Comme des Garons 2 Man was created by Marc Buxton in 2004, close on the heels of Gucci Pour Homme. Buxton is well known for his unusual creations at Comme des Garçons. In addition he has orchestrated fragrances for Versace, Salvador Dali, Cartier, and Paco Rabanne. Early on, he did some of the Alain Delon fragrances. Like Gucci Pour Homme, Commes des Garçons 2 Man is something of a muddle in terms of nomenclature. Its name implies something of a masculine flanker to Comme des Garçons 2, which until then seemed to have been considered by many a unisex scent.

These confusions only add to the seeming interchangeability of the two fragrances themselves. Smell them at a remove from one another and you might swear they’re virtually identical. I did, many times. Yet there are subtle and even distinct differences between the two. Both are anchored by leather, vetiver, and incense accords. This gives them a shared tone of tangy smokiness, but whereas CDG retains a strong orientation towards tangy, Gucci submerges itself under more smoke.

Gucci is often considered a cedar fragrance, but you won’t find cedar in the pyramid. You will find olibanum, however. Like Guerlain Nahema, which conjures rose without actually employing it, Gucci manages to evoke something which isn’t there. Many people mistake olibanum for cedar and thus detect in Gucci Pour Homme the dreaded “pencil shavings”. Interestingly, olibanum typically has an orange aroma to it, which I don’t discern in Gucci Pour Homme, but I don’t discern pencil shavings either. Of the 123 customers sounding in on basenotes, many do. Perhaps that subtle aroma of citrus complicates what seems like a fairly linear scent in largely undetectable ways. There are ginger and white pepper up top and amber at the bottom, the latter probably contributing to the overall coniferous impression. Yet more than anything Gucci Pour Homme is the rich, oily but arid smell of burning incense, and a useful comparison can be made with YSL’s M7, the agarwood of which takes Gucci Pour Homme’s incense inclinations to their logical end points, and smells nothing like cedar but very much like Gucci Pour Homme--on steroids.

The top and middle notes of Comme des Garçons 2 Man are listed as white smoke, nutmeg, cumin, mahogany, saffron, iris, and nutmeg. The frankincense at the bottom can be smelled from the first, but it’s vetiver you apprehend most discernibly into the dry down. The vetiver note is made a little more complicated by cumin, nutmeg, and, according to Luca Turin, a big dose of aldehydes, which seem to wear off fairly quickly.

It might be the aldehydes which give some of the fragrance’s detractors an impression of synthetics. Either way, Comme des Garçons 2 is made more unusual by their inclusion, and though they leave quickly their effect createes a lasting impression, creating a singeing sensation, as though someone had struck a match to light incense and snuffed it, mingling the smells. Saffron adds an interesting touch, a tobacco or hay-like aroma. There's a lot going on in there. Comme des Garçons feels much more conceptual than Gucci Pour Homme, the picture it paints more vividly detailed, and it seems less linear for it.

Both have respectable sillage, though less than you’d expect from incense fragrances. Gucci Pour Homme is available at Perfumania. Comme des Garçons can be found online, or you can call the Perfume House in Portland, which stocks it. I own both now and find, however often they intersect as they develop, they stand alone quite well, too.