10/15/2021
Intersport
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Works like a medicine, behaves like a drug # 3
spice' or 'melange' is the name of the mind-expanding drug that Frank Herbert's Dune is all about. When Rei Kawakubo smelled a second attempt by the young Mark Buxton, then working for Symrise's predecessor, sometime before 1994 AD, she is said to have said that it smelled like a drug. Although this draft, which was apparently hastily dismissed by many colleagues as an accord and not the full score a perfume probably requires at the time, was still to be followed by around 90 modifications, Kawakubo insisted on the draft, which was released shortly thereafter as Comme des Garçons Eau de Parfum 1994. An advertising campaign, headlined 'A perfume that works like a medicine and behaves like a drug' showed a moth highly concentrated snacking on an orchid in Madagascar. How apt. Buxton's name will always remain for me in the association of the fragrances he designed, starting from this one, for Comme des Garçons. A clou of the first Eau de Parfum was also that it has not too obviously 90's Japonismen endeavored. Although the ingredients could just as easily be located elsewhere, Kenzo's pour Homme or Issey Miyake's first L'eaux played with a Western staging of all sorts of projections of what could be Japanese. The perfume is spicy - spice pure. Mark Buxton is said to have designed it shortly after a stay in Morocco, but largely and without clear amber or labdanum skillfully abstains from too clear an assignment to the Monde Arabe, such as Lutens proposed to a drumbeat the year before. At Buxton, this was to follow in 2002 with Series 3: Incense - Ouarzazate. Aside from Caron's Poivre (1954) and Cacharel's Pour Homme (1981), Lorenzo Villoresi's Spezie, also from 1994 offers an interesting parallel. I've preferred the lighter eau de cologne version to the eau de parfum for years, but there's another by Buxton that impressed me at least as much: Comme des Garçons 3.
3 leans the furthest out of the spice, wood, incense framework that has characterized many releases over the years in varying intensities, 3 is vegetal, herbal and ultra green. Bitter angelica, basil and currant dominate, Buxton, who likes to talk about his fondness for smells from his parents' kitchens, has resorted here more to fresh leaves than dry spice. 3 was advertised as an imaginary flower, a new kind of a rose: incandescent, iridescent, electrifying. That's all true; rose here I would see at most as a green, sour immature rosebud, at least as far abstracted as the recent 'roses' bursting with geranium in Rose et Cuir or the geranium modulation from Jardin du Nil. 3 develops only slowly, and always stays close to the botanical, vétiver and cedarwood taking over later, here there are moments when 3 appears smoothly as a slightly eccentric vétiver, the dry woody note that should also often follow in Comme des Garçons is highly delicately elaborated. Much like the first eau de parfum, 3 has aged well. Available for almost 20 years, appears, just by the distance from everything sometimes described as Comme des Garçons perfume's DNA, still solitary and unexciting. In the current discourse on new 'green' fragrances, an important, quiet voice.
3 leans the furthest out of the spice, wood, incense framework that has characterized many releases over the years in varying intensities, 3 is vegetal, herbal and ultra green. Bitter angelica, basil and currant dominate, Buxton, who likes to talk about his fondness for smells from his parents' kitchens, has resorted here more to fresh leaves than dry spice. 3 was advertised as an imaginary flower, a new kind of a rose: incandescent, iridescent, electrifying. That's all true; rose here I would see at most as a green, sour immature rosebud, at least as far abstracted as the recent 'roses' bursting with geranium in Rose et Cuir or the geranium modulation from Jardin du Nil. 3 develops only slowly, and always stays close to the botanical, vétiver and cedarwood taking over later, here there are moments when 3 appears smoothly as a slightly eccentric vétiver, the dry woody note that should also often follow in Comme des Garçons is highly delicately elaborated. Much like the first eau de parfum, 3 has aged well. Available for almost 20 years, appears, just by the distance from everything sometimes described as Comme des Garçons perfume's DNA, still solitary and unexciting. In the current discourse on new 'green' fragrances, an important, quiet voice.
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