Get Thee to a Nunnery: Comme Des Garçons by Comme Des Garçons and Eau de Toilette Vétyver

The original Comme Des Garçons perfume is not what you’d expect. While the house is best know for fragrances with notes of brown tape, glue, garage, and “a little bit of pollution,” their eponymous 1994 release smells like cedar, cinnamon, cloves, pepper and pine. If you’re thinking pumpkin spice latte, you’re not totally off base. Shouldn’t the OG Comme Des Garçons perfume smell more like the inside of an iMac G3 than the bottom of a Hobby Lobby bargain bin?

Maybe! But don’t worry, she’s still a freak. The opening is all warm, fragrant spices delivered ice cold and metallic, as though they wafted to your nose via a plume of blue incense. There is an artificial woody/ vinyl thing in here that pairs beautifully with a chewy trident note to deliver a photorealistic grandma’s pocketbook accord. The fun really begins in the drydown with an oily, pickley olive brine moat around a forest of decade old Christmas trees, each one covered in dusty pinecones and petrified gingerbread men.

Apparently there are 12 oils of ancient scripture and, of the notes listed, this contains three: cedar, frankincense, and galbanum. I also smell cypress so let’s go with four— this perfume is positively biblical! It was launched the same year as CK One, designed by genius Alberto Morillas as a non-perfume perfume for a consumer uninterested in betraying olfactory effort beyond a whisper of green tea and lemon peel. Two years prior Issey Miyake worked with Jacques Cavallier to create L’Eau D’Issey, a perfume “as clear as spring water” that smells like it. I love these early 90s water-scented perfumes because they remind me of being nine years old with no bills, but they also speak to a time when people buying fragrances were going to great lengths to smell as close as possible to nothing at all. Placing CDG in context with the ultra-sheer frags of its day makes it all the more creepy and confusing! It smells like a mix of a hippy store, a chapel, and an attic full of wrapping paper. It’s bone dry and oily? Warm and ice-cold? The bottle is clear, it smells like dill-pickle Christmas, and the juice is the color of piss! Like, they didn’t need to do all that!

Tonight I was feeling extra pious, so rather than lean into the Andres Serrano vibes, I went monastic and layered CDG with a light Vétyver eau de toilette I bought in Marseille that’s made by nuns. I am a major vet-head and love a skanky one, but this is a good girl: a straight-forward, soapy, lightly lemony vetiver that begs for a head-to-toe post-shower application. A friend told me all he gets when I wear this is isobutylquinoline, which famously smells like vinyl and asparagus, but I won’t let that spoil my good time! Layered with Comme Des Garçons, the two frags get a bit playful. Do not get me wrong, each of these perfumes rock on their own, but if you want to feel like you’ve accomplished something before you leave the house, try wearing both at once. The vet lifts the CDG with a hit of vibrant citrus and tamps down the oily Castelvetrano thing. Call me a master brewer but if you’re looking for something weird, wearable, cold, Christian, and confusing for Fall I think I’ve cracked it! Happy Holidays :)