Floriental

While we respectfully choose to call them "spicy florals," the fragrance family combining floral notes with the dark woods, spices and resins that distinguish are so popular as to be nearly ubiquitous. But with Comme des Garçons, there's always a twist, and so this release from the avant garde Japanese/French fashion stalwart, has chosen as its floral of note the Cistus flower- a flower without a scent. And so, this is a postmodern floral, one where the sweet, lush, peppery aspects of flowers are created from plum, pink pepper, and sandalwood, and where labdanum- the rich resin that's the true fragrant bounty of the cistus bush- forms the basis of this complex perfume. And in the modern, mischievous style of Comme des Garçons, it's even nontraditional in structure- without classically defined top, heart and base notes, the fragrance evolves in unpredictable waves, trading off between lush fruitiness, resinous woods and fiery spice with delightful frequency, resulting in a scent that wears differently each time. At once layered and unstructured, simple and modern, masculine and feminine, this scent is a landscape of wonderful contradiction, with a single exception- it's 100% CDG.