I picked this up because it's another Bernard Chant composition and the reviews for Cabochard on Fragrantica are full of men saying it's identical or inferior to Aramis. So, having a massive stockpile of 1970s Cabochard EdT myself, I decided to do a head to head test to see if they were right.
My verdict is: I can see why people notice the similarities, especially in the heart of the fragrance, but the openings and drydowns are so radically different I don't know why people are ranking them against each other at all. They're clearly close relatives but they're also clearly for very different people (The 'Cabochard for Men' quip is not entirely off; Aramis is definitely a direct descendent).
The opening of Aramis is unequivocally and aggressively in the barbershop tradition, compared to Cabochard's warmth and almost sweetness. Cabochard is distinctly floral from application on. Both have jasmine in the heart and have their very similar bases of leather, oakmoss, etc peek through, but Cabochard is consistently almost soapy whereas Aramis keeps its barbershop character, with a brief hit of that soap. Cabochard feels a bit melancholy, but Aramis is distinctly a bit brighter. This is where they smell the most similar to each other.
The drydowns are radically different to my nose - Cabochard is warm tobacco and leather blended with florals, whereas Aramis has a strong overlay that smells like cumin, though it's unlisted. It's more than a bit funky.
[ETA: The longevity of the drydown on Aramis is pretty incredible - it was still very much there the next morning, unlike Cabochard]
I'm not rating this because that wasn't the point of this exercise, but if you are an Aramis fan and want to see what Bernard Chant did with the same skeleton for women, or you like Aramis but find the barbershop vibe a little too classically masculine for you, checking out Cabochard might be worthwhile.
(To be extremely charitable to those Cabochard reviewers, there are modern flankers that are further away from the mothership than Aramis and Cabochard are from each other. But that's more of an observation on how today releasing a new perfume as a flanker is considered less risky than releasing it as a totally new piece of IP, not on how close these two actually are to each other.)
