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Rouge Comme des Garçons 2020

7.7 / 10 200 Ratings

A popular perfume by Comme des Garçons for women and men, released in 2020. The scent is spicy-earthy. It is being marketed by Puig.
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Main accords

Spicy

Earthy

Smoky

Fruity

Resinous

Fragrance Pyramid

Top Notes

Indonesian ginger

Pink pepper

Heart Notes

Beetroot

Egyptian geranium leaf

Base Notes

Frankincense

Labdanum

Patchouli

Perfumer

Nathalie Gracia-Cetto

Videos

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Ratings

Scent

7.7200 Ratings

Longevity

7.8167 Ratings

Sillage

7.3171 Ratings

Bottle

7.9148 Ratings

Value for money

7.298 Ratings

Submitted by OPomone · last update on 11/28/2025.

Source-backed & verified

Interesting Facts

The advertising campaign was created under the artistic direction of photographer and director Jordan Hemingway.

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Reviews

14 in-depth fragrance descriptions

03/12/2025

9.5Scent 7Longevity 8Sillage

Elieli
3 Reviews

Elieli

3

The closest thing to the Jitterbug Perfume

For all my fellow perfume lovers out there, if you want a good novel with perfume as a central plot point, Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins is the pick for me. Robbins is a hilarious writer, and the titular perfume in the novel is made with base notes of beetroot. Since reading this book years ago I've been a bit obsessed with the idea of a beetroot perfume. I love beets, and the mysterious soil/vegetal smell they have. This perfume, I think, delivers on that fantasy while being very sexy at the same time. On first smell you mostly get patchouli, incense, ginger, but the complex earthy beet smell lingers underneath. I get lots of compliments on it, and yet it still fulfills the wish I have to wear something a bit unexpected. Beautiful.

09/03/2022

Mlleghoul
462 Reviews

Mlleghoul

3

A witch's cauldron summer tipple

Comme des Garcons Rouge is an odd and surprising scent, and at all not what I expected to smell from this glossy, cherry red popsicle of a bottle. It instead reminds me of an artwork by the fabulous, and flamboyant Argentinian painter, Leonor Fini In Les Sorcieres, we observe five frenzied witches swarming and swooping on their broomsticks through a swirling blood-red sky. This scent mirrors these feverish sensations of airy, dizzying fizziness and couples them with a terrestrial earthiness, like herbs and leaves and things freshly dug from a garden patch. Rouge smells like an effervescent shrub (the vinegary drink, not the bushy plant. But also minus most of the vinegar) of rhubarb and beet, fiery ginger root, and floral pink pepper. A witch's cauldron tipple that tapers to a beautiful gingery incense.

02/21/2025

10Scent 7Longevity 7Sillage

pandanwidth
4 Reviews

pandanwidth

2

Beet fizz with incense

I don't know how a French-Japanese perfume house managed to create a photorealistic accord of a freshly opened can of Vernor’s ginger ale (if you’re from Michigan, you get it) but they did. This has such a delicious ginger note. It’s fresh and realistic but carbonated and purified of the savory vegetal qualities of actual fresh grated ginger. It makes your nose tingle if you sniff it up close.

And the beet. It’s unexpected and wonderful. It’s like a fantasy beet note with the earthy, dirty qualities trimmed off. It’s the kind of beet that reminds you that beets can be used to make sugar. It’s brilliant magenta and hyper-real.

The patchouli and transparent incense base has the classic CdG DNA and leans more patchouli/woody than resinous. Spicy ginger fizzles up into the air for 6-7 hours. Nothing in this is cloyingly sweet or heavy. Despite the unusual notes and the avant garde marketing it’s very wearable.

11/28/2025

7.5Scent 6Longevity 6Sillage

valhelsingv
199 Reviews

valhelsingv

Kitchen storage of my Eastern Orthodox grandmother

Smells like the kitchen storage cellar of my late Eastern Orthodox grandmother... Mostly beets, and a little bit of church :D

The ginger note is mild and fresh, similar to Melancolia by Liquides Imaginaires. The incense was present primarily in the opening for me, the dry-down is mostly just raw beet (with greens) and ginger. A dash of resins, maybe...

It's very interesting, and I like beets, so I'm not complaining, but I was hoping for more incense when I got the decant.

Still, a very unusual and well-done scent.

10/24/2023

8Scent 8Longevity 9Sillage

Marieposa
90 Reviews

Translated · Show original

Marieposa

Top Review 43

Snow White

The ginger root bursts in my hands like spice into powder.
Behind the seven mountains, the time is ripe to hold up a mirror to her. Aldehyde-smooth and sweetly sharp like pink pepper.
As white as snow, as red as ...

Let’s leave that aside.

For you, Queen, have melted asphalt on your bare foot, no matter how light and bright the cool incense crown hovers over your head. Where dark soils breathe mushroom spores, you have buried the leather coat.
Long, long ago, but I know and know and know it simply. And when the rain falls, the memory awakens.

… Metal rose thorns … pierce delicate skin …

Well? Ring a bell?

… A red drop of pure blood ... A glass coffin in the dark ... The fairest one in the whole land …

But today, sugar crystals sparkle ruby red on my lips, sweeter than pomegranate seeds, as the cool breath of the forest follows me.

When does red turn to black?

When does hot turn to cold?

**

Strictly speaking, it’s not a smile that brings blush to my face, but almost a diabolical grin. Yes, this is exactly how a Comme des Garçons fragrance should smell! Namely contradictory, unexpected, perhaps even a little disturbing, yet stunningly beautiful and perfectly balanced.
In my opinion, the wheel with Rouge has not been reinvented; the scent resembles in its structure "Comme des Garçons 2 | Comme des Garçons," one of my favorites from the house. In both fragrances, a cool, aldehydic-spicy top note with plenty of incense hovers over an abstract neo-chypre structure with a floral heart. Where 2 features cumin, Rouge relies on pink pepper and ginger. After that, in both scents, a rose spreads its petals - white, just lightly touched with pink in 2 and ruby red in Rouge, and in both cases abstract enough and so finely woven that my rose-reluctant nose doesn’t think to raise the alarm. That’s exactly the point where Rouge becomes so extraordinary, because from the aforementioned rose, the fragrance develops its surprising, perhaps even irritating facet by transforming red flowers into red fruit, namely into beetroot.
Of course, I had read this in the pyramid beforehand and didn’t quite believe it - not that I could identify beetroot as a note, and even less that it would smell good. But when unexpectedly both turned out to be the case, I became almost manically enthusiastic about deciphering how the beets come into the scent, and I believe, after long, excessive sniffing, I have somewhat succeeded: I think that something that could be pomegranate emphasizes the fruity and sweet notes of the rose and combines with earthy patchouli to create the bitter-sweet signature of the vegetable. Additionally, strangely exotic plant-mineral notes mix with the metallic off-notes of the rose, which I have identified as geosmin after what must be the umpteenth attempt.
At this stage, Rouge smells bright and fresh and brilliantly red, but at an indeterminate point, it moves in a completely different direction, causing me to actually pause and wonder which fragrance I am wearing. In the base, suddenly smoky-leathery aspects (incense - really? Still? - and labdanum) along with the rain-on-forest-floor impression of patchouli and geosmin take the lead. A tar note joins in, which I can’t quite place and which perhaps only exists in my head, but for a figment of imagination, it reliably appears time and again.

All in all, I find Rouge to be demanding and challenging, but very wearable, adventurous, and phenomenally good - just as I expect from Comme des Garçons.

Thank you for the testing opportunity, dear Mourant!

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