Comme des Garçons
A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
The cumin and cardamom slap you first—an aggressively spiced, almost medicinal blast that reads more pharmacy than spice market. That metallic rose oxide screams through like rebar cutting through cement, sharp and cold, whilst clove adds a numbing, dental quality that makes your nose feel anaesthetised.
The jasmine finally surfaces, but it's been drained of colour—a wan, papery floral impression rather than anything lush or narcotic. Rose oxide continues its high-pitched whine, now tempered slightly by woody accords that arrive dusty and chalky, like walking through a building site where flowers have inexplicably taken root in the rubble.
What remains is powdery, mineralic, vaguely musky—the sandalwood and cedarwood rendered almost abstract, like the memory of wood rather than wood itself. A cool, synthetic sweetness hovers on the skin, simultaneously clean and somehow industrial, as if someone crushed rose petals into fresh concrete and left them to cure.
Concrete might be the most literally titled fragrance in Comme des Garçons' architectural repertoire. This is what brutalist buildings would smell like if they exhaled: mineral-cold synthetic florals trapped behind a wall of dusty, metallic spice. Nicolas Beaulieu has created something genuinely confrontational here, where rose oxide—that molecule responsible for the shrill, almost geranium-like facets of rose—collides head-on with cumin's sweaty earthiness and cardamom's eucalyptus-sharp greenness. The jasmine sambac lurks somewhere in this concrete mixer, but it's been stripped of its indolic warmth and rendered almost bloodless, a floral ghost haunting a construction site at dawn.
What's fascinating is how intensely synthetic this reads whilst never feeling cheap. The woods in the base—sandalwood and cedarwood—arrive powdery and abstracted, like sawdust suspended in resin rather than actual timber. That 100% synthetic accord reading makes perfect sense; this is CdG revelling in artificiality, creating a scent that exists in the uncanny valley between natural and chemical. The musk adds a coolness that keeps everything bloodless and austere.
Add fragrances to your collection and unlock your personalised scent DNA, note map, and shareable identity card.
4.0/5 (103)