Rouge Comme des Garçons 2020

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

Let's not go there.

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

... Rose thorns of metal ... penetrate delicate skin ...

Well? Does what ring a bell?

... Red drop of pure blood ... A coffin of glass in the dark ... The most beautiful probably in the whole country ...

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

When does red turn to black?

When hot to cold?
Strictly speaking, it is not a smile that Rouge conjures up in my face, but almost a diabolical grin. Jaaaa, exactly so a Comme des Garçons fragrance must smell! Namely contradictory, unexpected, maybe even a bit disturbing, but stunningly beautiful and perfectly balanced.
According to my nose, the wheel was not reinvented with Rouge, the fragrance is similar in structure to Comme des Garçons 2, one of my favorites of the house. In both fragrances, a cool, aldehydic-spicy top note with lots of incense hovers over an abstract neo-chypre structure with a floral heart. Where 2 ramps up cumin, Rouge relies on pink pepper and ginger. After that, a rose spreads its petals in both fragrances - white, only very delicately doused in pink in 2 and ruby red in Rouge, and abstract enough in both cases and so finely interwoven that my rose-delayed nose doesn't think to sound the alarm. This is precisely the point at which Rouge becomes so extraordinary, because it is from said rose that the fragrance develops its surprising, perhaps even irritating facet, transforming red flowers into red fruit, namely beet.
Of course, I read that in advance in the pyramid and didn't really want to believe it - not that I could comprehend beet as a note, and even less that it would smell good. But when, unexpectedly, both were the case, it was with almost manic enthusiasm that I set my mind to deciphering how the beetroot got into the scent, and I think, after a long, excessive sniffing, I halfway succeeded: I think there's something that could be pomegranate here, underlining the fruity and sweet notes of the rose and combining with earthy patchouli to create the bitter-sweet signature of the vegetable. Also, strangely alien planty-mineral notes mingle with the metallic off-notes of the rose, which I think I've identified as geosmin on what-knows-how-many attempts.
At this stage, Rouge smells bright and fresh and bright red, but moves in a completely different direction from a point that cannot be clearly named, so that I actually briefly began to ponder which fragrance I was wearing. In the base, smoky-leathery aspects (incense - really? Still? - and labdanum) suddenly set the tone along with the rain-on-forest floor impression of patchouli and geosmin. In addition, a tar note joins, which I can not quite assign and which possibly exists only in my head, but for a figment of my imagination quite reliably appears again and again.

All in all, I find Rouge to be sophisticated and demanding, but very wearable, adventurous and phenomenally good - in other words, exactly what I expect from Comme des Garçons.

Thank you for the test opportunity, dear Mourant!