G I R L by Pharrell Williams Comme des Garçons 2014

G I R L by Pharrell Williams by Comme des Garçons

Bottle Design House Holme

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6.8 / 10 159 Ratings

G I R L by Pharrell Williams is a perfume by Comme des Garçons for women and men and was released in 2014. The scent is spicy-woody. It was last marketed by Puig.

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Main accords

Spicy

Woody

Floral

Synthetic

Powdery

Fragrance Pyramid

Top Notes

White pepper

Lavender

Neroli

Heart Notes

Iris

Styrax

Violet

Base Notes

Sandalwood

Vetiver

Patchouli

Cedar

Perfumers

Christian Astuguevieille, Antoine Lie

Videos

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Ratings

Scent

6.8159 Ratings

Longevity

7.2129 Ratings

Sillage

6.4129 Ratings

Bottle

6.9140 Ratings

Value for money

7.825 Ratings

Submitted by Franfan20, last update on 27.09.2023.

Interesting Facts

The scent is a collaborative work of Comme des Garçons and Pharrell Williams, named after his album.

Reviews

8 in-depth fragrance descriptions

09/11/2014

2.5
Sillage 7.5
Longevity 7
Scent

Sleuth
30 Reviews

Sleuth

Top Review 8

First impression: unusual violet perfume

With 3 sprays on my wrist, I thought of two things: Unlike most celebrities Pharrell dares to do something different. Great. Secondly there's an unusual greyish accord, so there's a bit of Comme des Garçons in here.

G I R L starts with a combination of fresh violet and an equal blast of the grey accord. It reminded me of 'He Wood' and 'She Wood'. Let me describe the grey accord: Grey because it evoked impressions of sand or clay, though more towards sand. Another reviewer calls it a milky quality. Its texture is like fine woody light grey saw dust. I'm guessing the accord is made from iris and ??..

After 30 minutes a violet note appears, very slightly candied, a little sweeter than in the beginning. This note leans to the feminine side but it's fine for guys too. At 1 hour on my skin the violet is in the lead, the grey starts to decline.

At 2 hours: I get dry notes, a bit woody, a bit of patchouli and perhaps a hint of spiciness. Some may find this leaning to the masculine. At 6-7+ hours: same smell with more vetiver. I suggest testing G I R L with at least 3 sprays and wait until this phase. Not sure how much I like it. It's better than weak patch/vetiver notes in celeb scents. But this phase has weak sillage and doesn't smell amazing.

It's not a crowd pleaser, and also not unusual enough to be weird. Possibly this will not become a success. But G I R L smells different and I like that a lot!

04/17/2015

ColinM
516 Reviews

ColinM

Very helpful Review 6

Fun pop scent

Girl has a peculiar opening which smells at the same time conventional and unusual: a compelling blend of clean-powdery flowers (violet), slightly creamy-soapy too (ylang?), something similar to musk ketones providing their signature sort of sweet milky-fruity creaminess (something quite close to fig, although it’s not listed), a really fresh and zesty mix of green, minty, aromatic herbs (I get basil and mint) and citrus-neroli notes, a pleasant, soft woody-mossy accord, vanilla and – here comes the slightly more “unusual” part – a well-executed spicy-resinous dry accord which I can not dissect but that manages to “break” an otherwise fairly conventional blend (green-fruity-woody-milky), making it become a somehow more creative, playful, colourful collage. I read these spicy-pungent notes may be pepper and styrax but I also smell something heavily synthetic that makes them slightly more pungent and rubbery. Anyway, the final result is a really pleasant and funny sort of “colourful white” scent, meaning it’s white, clean, green, but with a lot of nuances which go just great together – a pink silky-vanillic floral breeze, crunchy woody-green tips, a mossy base, a culinary-Oriental touch of spices, a hyper-fake fruity note which however here works somehow, and an overall contemporary feel (and also a bit “mainstream” to be honest... norlimbanol?) which is restrained and well-blended enough not to ruin the look. The drydown is a bit disappointing as it’s mostly about rubbery-spicy stuff, but for some 2-3 hours it’s a nice scent to wear. Shortly, not the most original fragrance around for sure, but it’s Pharrell in the end, and as far as I know him, I think it quite reflects his approach to music business: half mainstream, half creative, a bit “teenish”, but careful enough to put together a decent product. Too expensive for its value in my opinion and surely incomparable to several other Comme des Garçons, but still nice!

7/10

03/02/2018

jtd
484 Reviews

jtd

Very helpful Review 6

comme des pharrell

The design house Comme des Garçons occupies a specific perch in the fashion world. It is known for being off-beat, progressive, trend-setting. Search for "Comme des Garçons" and "avant-garde"--- it'll take days to dig through all the results. The brand has a strong interest in maintaining an unconventional appearance. CdG's perfumes convey the bona fides of their non-conformity by emphasizing three qualities: iconoclasm ('anti-perfumes' such as Odeur 53 and Odeur 71), thingness (recontextualized scents like Dry Clean, Sticky Cake and Concrete) and a signature style of synth-woodiness. The first two speak to the reputation CdG want to preserve, the third identifies the brand and ties it to that reputation. The question is to what extent the brand has the brand reduced avantgardism to a set of signifiers in an attempt to market their artistry?

After the Series collections of 2000-2008 the brand focussed on marketing creative collaboration. Collaborations with Stephen Jones, Monocle, Daphne Guinness, Hussein Chalayan and Gosha Rubchinskiy widen CdG's style profile and replenish the brand's street cred. In 2014 CdG joined forces with Pharrell Williams on the perfume Girl. It was a significant ramp-up from figures known strictly to close followers of the fashion industry to the most prominent superstar of the day. CdG phrased Girl as a collaborative project, but let's call it what it is. Girl is a celebrity perfume.

So what did each of the collaborators stand to gain?

For Pharrell, it's easy. Affiliation with avant-garde ('serious') art gives a high-brow to his pop career. Pharrell has a track record of pop-up style art and design projects and for him, creating a perfume with a groovy fashion brand was no different. It supported the narrative that he is ‘about’ creative idiosyncrasy and avant-garde style. Accumulated incidences of cool give him legitimacy and balance out large scale public projects (think The Voice) with smaller artsy ones. The free advertising that the perfume provided for his album Girl didn’t hurt. If I sound cynical, I'm not. The integration of Pharrell Williams's musical work and his interest in design and fashion is smart and intriguing. It breaks down the boundaries between marketing and the work being marketed.

CdG's gains were different. Pharrell didn't win a new demographic, nor did he need to. CdG on the other hand did gain exposure to a wider market. By making a celebrity fragrance but couching it as an artistic collaboration, CdG sought to immunize themselves against accusations of ordinariness. It gave them a new foothold on the shelves of Sephora without sacrificing the high ground. It was an opportunity to sell out without selling out.

Girls has been promoted as a mainstream version of CdG’s style of spare woods but in truth, the perfume's sweet synthy woods put it more in line with young men's club fragrances like Paco Rabanne 1 Million, Victor and Rolf Spicebomb and Tom Ford Noir Extreme. They all share a similar design concept. Tenacious woods, syrupy/powdery sweetness, spice notes and aromatics all shout for your attention. A lavender/violet topnote gives Girl a passing similarity to an aromatic fougère, but the demanding sweet-woody accord drills to the surface quickly and smothers the lavender in syrup. The perfume vibrates on a frequency that that suggests lopsided doses of industrial strength woody aromachemicals and the topnotes in particular are piercing.

As with all of CdG's joint perfume projects, there is an assumption that the perfume will be a reflection of the artistic collaboration that went into the project. But what if it’s not? In this case the perfume and the story have next to nothing in common. If Girl had shown evidence of the high minded artistic collaboration that CdG and Pharrell would have us believe I might feel less like I’ve been sold a bill of goods. Unfortunately Girl has the expediency of a convenient hook-up and makes Pharrell and Comme des Carçons seem more like friends with benefits rather than serious collaborators.

(from scenthurdle.com)

02/14/2017

Mrsg37
32 Reviews

Mrsg37

Very helpful Review 6

Unsung beauty

I really like this, I tend to avoid celebrity scents but got this for a good price and the notes are right up my street. A blast of pepper settles down to a lovely woodsy fragrance combined with patchouli, cedar and vetiver with a waft of iris. I really don't understand why this isn't more popular it's really rather lovely. It's not a girly girl perfume but it's very unisex, I'm glad I bought it before it disappears. Perhaps if CDG had released this without the endorsement of pharell williams it would have done better in the sales market.

12/22/2014

Rickbr
190 Reviews

Rickbr

Very helpful Review

I think that the association between Pharrell and CDG is something very natural. Both are able to create something between the commertial and the edgy or exotic according the project they are developing and i think that it was exactly this CDG hability that caught Pharrell atention and made him want to launch something through them: he was atracted by Wonderwood and its hability, as he says, to deliver something more hard, a pure woody fragrance, to the masses. Girls seems to be born from wonderwood, but for me it's successfull where that one fails. I dislike that wonderwood is too much monolithic on me, it gaves you the impression of wearing a fragrance made only of basenotes and nothing else. without a proper dynamic. Girl seems to keep the Wonderwood woodiness at a proper level, giving it the right balance and proper caliber to make it more unissex, In this version, i feel that the sandalwood stands out more in a creamier way. The cedar and vetiver are still very clear but they don't make the composition so dry and incensey. The part that i like the most, however, it's the harmony of the green and floral elements. Girl opens on me with a delicious green aroma, something that reminds me both of violet leafs and also of fresh figs. It's a green, slightly floral, creamy and milky aroma, very lovely. Then, on a second phase the the violet impression is continued by the floral iris side which is for me contrasted with a peppery impression, that seems to act here to make the balance between the masculine and feminine side of the composition. I like the subtle neroli touch, a citric flower that seems very suitable for both sexes with is slightly sweet, green and floral aroma, and i also enjoy the herbal and a little bit sweet use of the lavender here. Girl was a very nice surprise for me, a fragrance that it's like the most mainstream Pharrell musics: the elements are very known, but the hability in deliver them makes you enjoy the melody and even sing along or tap your foot once it starts to play. It's already between my favorite celebrity scents, i really want a bottle of it!

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