Le 3ᵉ Homme Caron 1985 Eau de Toilette

If you want to draw any comparison between the current formula and the classic film with the similar name, then let that be one way to summarize it.

Current formula is a pleasant lavender and clove scent with a citrus opening. Longevity is at least six hours with only a few sprays, but your mileage may vary depending on your sprays. It projects at arms length, which is wide enough for the wearer and anyone near them to smell this scent for what it really is.

Not many people appreciate the smell of clove and that can be a problem. This fragrance is for any man who appreciates the smell of clove. Suckers may be lured into believing this is all about the fruity opening or the pleasant lavender unaware that this Harry Lime of a scent deviously dries down to one powerful clove scent.

Yes, the scent was named-so due to the fact that it is Caron's third masculine fragrance. However, many still bring up the film and may forget that the titular character was the antagonist.

Me? I wear it for the clove.

Sheer perfection.

This is the paragon of masculine fragrances. It just lifts my spirits, imparts vigor, makes me feel alive and confident, ready to face anything. I love the aroma of cloves and when combined with lavender, there is this synergy that just radiates on my skin.

The dry down is the pièce de résistance, it all coalesces into this mildly sweet, earthy, comforting base of tonka, oakmoss, and vetiver. From opening to skin scent, an undercurrent of simmering, animalic musk, suggestions of civet or castoreum, well-behaved, obedient, but enough to put a tiger in your tank.

This is timeless (pay no mind to any other reviewers who suggests it is dated or rather 'mature'). Be adventuresome, be fearless, have character, and wear Le Troisième Homme Caron.

I acquired the Caron masculine triptych, POUR UN HOMME, YATAGAN, and LE TROISIEME HOMME, after reading countless raves about all of them and discovering how reasonably priced they are. By far my favorite is LE TROISIEME HOMME. This smells simply splendid and strikes me as entirely unisex if not slightly more feminine than masculine. There is something very appealing about this floral fougère, which goes relatively light on the lavender, happily, and is so well blended that I have difficulty teasing out any individual notes. I will say that it strikes me as an olfactory neighbor of ELdO JASMIN ET CIGARETTE, which I recently tested and very much enjoyed. True the compositions are completely different, but the timbre and texture (and perspective!) are very similar, it seems to me. In addition to the jasmine overlap, there is also a tobacco-esque quality here as well, perhaps imparted by the vetiver mingling with the oakmoss.

IMNSHO, this is a million times better than POUR UN HOMME, which is way too lavender-loud and vanilla proud.

Coincidentally, "The Third Man", directed by Carol Reed and starring Orson Welles, is one of my favorite films of all time.

Le 3' Homme de Caron, and like most masculine Caron scents, is a fragrance with a lot of what I call, 'oomph'.

It's hard to find fragrances like this these days that represent the way a manly man should smell. This fragrance opens with such power and masculinity that it's difficult to resist a tester card sprayed with this, let alone a man.

It's perhaps not as 'savage' as Yatagan, but Le 3' Homme de Caron is fiercely green and herbaceous in its opening. As it settles, lavender, sweet lemon and clove are apparent.

For the first hour or so this is all about being a man, however towards the drydown it takes on a powdery accord and a sweetness that can only be likened to the scent of shaving foam. This is where female consumers may feel obliged to wear this fragrance themselves.

It manages to be refined yet sensual, and upon further testing it seems that there's a touch of vanilla in there somewhere too. It's a pity that Caron's masculine fragrances have been overshadowed by the ghastly aromatics and aquatics as of late. I would buy up on scents such as these just to keep them in the market.

Older men probably prefer this over the younger generation but I can only encourage them as a young twenty year old woman to broaden their horizons. This is not dated despite being made in the 80's and is in my opinion, one of the finest woody aromatic scents for men that I've had the pleasure of smelling.

Wonderfully complex, soothing and classy, a man should not go past this classic Le 3' Homme de Caron.

I was watching a video of Leonard Bernstein describing Beethoven’s compositional style. To paraphrase: “Though he was not a good melodist nor a good harmonist nor a good orchestrator, his works are works of genius. How? It was the form. In Beethoven, every single note that succeeded the prior note was the right note. Invariably. How he did it, no one knows, because he struggled: he scratched out, he beat himself up, he never left his rooms, he was constantly in agony, always saying he was merely touching the tip of the iceberg. And yet every single note in his works checks out, no matter how unpredictable, they are always right. No one had that, not even Mozart. It’s like he had a direct telephone line to God.”

Sometimes I get a similar feeling with a perfume. Le 3e Homme de Caron is one such beauty. From first spray to final drydown, every single note that follows the previous one is the right note, the perfect note. The entire composition flows seamlessly, like an inevitability. Like it was wired to us directly from Heaven.

To put it in context, it swam upriver when masculines were thumping their hairy chests with macho bravado, belting their husky baritones and revving their muscle cars. And it didn’t go the way of water and woods, those aquatic-antiseptic-alien-hyper-synths that were to sweep the fragrant ecosystem the following decade.

This was a different sort of creature, in a category that is historically bereft of exemplars (the floral masculine), and done in such a way that only Caron could (Françoise Caron was creative director, to boot). It’s floral, yes, with carnation and geranium and jasmine and rose (?) at the heart, but it’s a spiced up and green floral. To paraphrase Tania Sanchez, its message is pretty simple: “I’m beautiful before I’m anything else, masculine or feminine.”

Now, you have to love cloves (eugenol) and anise (anethol), because the perfect blend of one or both of these warm spices with that dreamy Caron lavender in the opening is a marriage made in heaven. This is a mood lifter that makes you say with a big smile on your face: IDGAF today, I’m just gonna feel good! But the real magic lies in the backbone: sultry and warm animalics that run through the bright opening and the floral heart and flow into the semi-sweet, earthy, musky dry-down for which it’s so well known and loved.

Among my all-time top five.