Comme des Garcons 2

Rei Kawakubo founded Comme des Garcons in Tokyo in 1969 and has spent the decades since refusing to make clothes that flatter. The perfume arm has behaved the same way. Its releases have never chased prettiness; they have chased ideas, and several of them were sold explicitly as anti-perfume, built from materials the industry considered unwearable. Comme des Garcons 2, launched in 1999 and commonly attributed to the perfumer Mark Buxton, is the release where that conceptual streak produced something genuinely beautiful rather than merely provocative. The house publishes its own ingredient list rather than a tidy pyramid, and it is worth reading: ink, incense, amber, labdanum, patchouli, Chinese cedarwood, new aldehydes, cumin, angelica root, vetiver, cade oil, absolute mate and magnolia. Ink is the note everyone talks about, and it is not marketing. There is a genuine metallic, papery, faintly bitter smell in the heart, somewhere between a fresh newspaper and a fountain pen, and it is the thing that stops the composition reading as a straightforward woody incense. Fragrantica's pyramid fills in the edges: aldehydes, mandarin, tea and mate up top, then nutmeg, coriander, caraway and cinnamon around the ink, resolving into incense, patchouli, vetiver, cedar, amber and labdanum. The house's own copy talks about complements and contrasts, mirrors and brilliance, light and shadow, which is unusually accurate for marketing prose. Worn, it opens cold and slightly effervescent, warms through a dry spice phase that flirts with cumin without ever becoming skin-like, and settles into a smoky, resinous, faintly sweet wood that hovers close to the body. It is a cerebral scent and it wears best on cool, still days. A Cape winter evening indoors, with a jersey on, suits it far better than heat, which flattens the ink and pushes the incense forward. Performance is moderate to good: six to eight hours on skin, longer on wool, with an unusually intimate projection that draws people in rather than announcing itself across a room. It has remained in continuous production and is still sold through the house's own channels, though wearers who have owned bottles across many years describe the current version as slightly smoother and less scratchy than the earliest ones, which is what you would expect after two decades of ingredient regulation.