Carbone Balmain 2010 Eau de Toilette

(All traffic police please look away for a moment) As soon as I spray Carbone de Balmain, I inevitably feel the urge to put on a leather jacket, not shave for the next three days, and hit the highway as fast as possible, flooring the gas pedal until my car reaches the absolute, total, speed-obsessed limit that ignores all rules of the road!!!… Phew, one needs to come down from this olfactory experience to write about it somewhat objectively.
Carbone is an extraordinary fragrance that is rightly associated time and again with motorsport and automobiles. The most fitting description that comes to mind is the smell of a balaclava, like the ones used in karting. A bit oily, technical, with remnants of gasoline and exhaust in the fabric - just the scent of motorsport.

However, the perfume is a bit more complex. Alongside the mentioned scent association, I distinctly smell spicy, erotic pepper in the top note, accompanied by a hint of something slightly green. It’s a brief, spicy whiff from the forests next to the track before the race begins. But Carbone always stays on the ideal line and never breaks into that Green Hell beyond the tire stacks. The Balmain offers grand racing! With the heart note, which now exclusively pumps gasoline through the veins of this perfume and focuses on the racing theme, it goes like Sterling Moss with his gaze on the asphalt, over a long parabolic curve, wafted by the sweet (fig) hint of success, onto the short finishing straight, at the end of which a lovely vanilla base awaits. Unfortunately, this base behaves like many technical specifications: it can only be admired on paper or test strips - the reality is different. On the skin, Carbone is not a 24-hour race, but rather a (somewhat longer) Grand Prix that spectacularly reaches the base after 3-4 hours. By then, unfortunately, there’s hardly anything left to smell (the sillage is also only moderate)! That’s a pity, but no reason not to uncork the champagne bottles - because this perfume still belongs to the winners in the lineup of men’s fragrances and will surely delight anyone with even a latent enthusiasm for motorsport.
James Dean, who at the time (if I remember correctly) was said to wear Knize Ten, would surely have been excited about Carbone, and if Steve McQueen were still alive today, he would forbid the sale of that ridiculous, fruity little water under his name and instead declare Carbone as his signature scent! Yes, Carbone conveys that wild, liberating ‘racetrack rebel feeling’ - this perfume has gasoline in its blood!

With all the enthusiastic words about the scent, a few sentences about the bottle. It should be a model for all bottle designers in the world. Solid, angular, and simple, like Volvo or Mercedes used to be; valuable, demanding, and ‘masculine’, like a Bentley or a BMW. Only with the cap did the controllers seem to have had their way, opting for a cheap, rather wobbly hard plastic (like from the interior of a Lada!) instead of the carbon cover from the options list. What a shame! … But that’s just a side note.
Carbone is an eccentric, outstanding, ‘masculine’ and individual scent with only a few minor weaknesses. I can imagine that it is an ideal perfume for some men who can identify with the praised motorsport image. Due to its relative rarity, this Balmain even has the potential to become a decent signature scent. Those who don’t know Carbone might want to sniff the distant relative Adventure by Davidoff - although the latter presents itself as fresher and more conventional.

For me, it’s not a signature scent. Personally, I prefer to wrap myself in dignified coats, wear my leather jacket (it feels) every few leap years, shave cleanly, my car barely manages 170 km/h, and my bathroom cabinet is filled with more elegant, clean, and stylish fragrances. A gentleman would certainly not reach for the somewhat dirty Carbone - but who wants to be a gentleman every day?!?! And so occasionally I get that “need for speed” and let loose olfactorily. If not on the highway, then in a smoky bar - that’s where the scent also belongs; there will be compliments there (!); one stands like James Dean at the bar and on the angular television above the counter, they’re not showing football, but the film “Le Mans” with the eternally cool Steve McQueen behind the wheel.