Le 3ᵉ Homme Caron 1985 Eau de Toilette

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.