Black
Comme des Garçons (2013)

Its just fantastic, its rubbery, tarry, smoky, slightly vanillic, black licorice. Perfect winter scent more or less. If you want something similar to Le Labo Patchouli 24 or Louis Vuitton Nuit de Feu, this is it right here, and more complex at that.

It’s a lazy holiday here and I finally sat down. Hadn’t meditated in months. We burned some copal incense afterwards. The whole apartment smells of a quiet ceremonial grounds in the highlands. (That’s where we’d be if we didn’t have to stay in the city). So I pulled out my favorite smoky scent to cement the vibe.

Among all the offerings in the CdG incense line that I sampled, this one stuck out from the get-go. I couldn’t get enough. Something weird, uneasy, and addictive about it. I went through a 2-ml vial and immediately wanted more. So I got a full bottle, which at $1/ml is great value.

This here is a witches’ brew of burning black pepper, warm tar, fluffy licorice-scented vinyl, and sparkling charcoal embers. It’s dark and deep, for sure, but somehow remains airy and light throughout. As the pepper and incense wind down, they meld with the base notes of vetiver roots and cedar wood. And then they hum, deliciously, on and on and on…

Black comes storming out the gate with blackpepper, burnt green woods, incense, and a clear black rubber accord blended in. Birch tar and licorice come into play fairly quickly. The opening stanza is very polarizing but keeps you sniffing for more. Once the initial eye opening smells settle in, the fragrance rides closer to the skin giving wafts of some burnt wet woods intermittently but ultimately dries down on my skin to a fragrance that is cedar and vetiver at the forefront with those woods playing mostly in the background. This strikes me as made by a perfumer who loves dark fragrances of yesteryear but put this together with modern sensibilities. Kudos for CdG doing something that isn’t just another mainstream attempt at the masses, and for putting something together that’s a bit of nose candy for those whose nostrils have experienced many different flavors. This is one of those fragrances that people should not blind buy. I like it, and will give it more wearings to determine if a full bottle is on the way. FWIW, my wife wasn’t too impressed by the opening but has been mainly indifferent to the drydown and yet acknowledging that she likes the cedar accord that her nose has honed in on. 👍

If obsidian shards could be cooked and thus release an aroma, they would smell of CDG Black. This is black pepper incense, plumes of forest smoke, cinder cone daydreams and licorice-scented vinyl records that would play public service announcements on conservation. Black is that delicious Maillard reaction on toasted marshmallows on a campfire, sands sweetness, sans gooey.

Peppery charcoal pillows, glowing embers at dusk, comforting warm tar on a cool, shivering night: this is what Black feels. The trigeminal nerve tickling black pepper eclipses the smoke in its heart, embedding itself into rubber: Never, ever had a lover who put the pedal to the metal and burn rubber on me, Charlene, oh, no—kinda rubber. It would make Bvlgari Black and Jacomo de Jacomo blush.

It mellows into creeping root stalks of vetiver, toasted oat morsels, and the most realistic driest sauna cedarwood accord—heavenly. CDG Black is a fragrance for the books, my favorite smoky scent. 

Heavily smoked woods ... burnt tar that's been baking under the sun ... and the dark savory-sweetness of licorice underlying everything. This one was always a fun fall scent for me, and one of my favorites from the brand.

This fragrance opens with a smoky, birch-incense scent, along with notes of leather and cedar. It's undoubtedly one of CDG's best fragrances, and it's personally one of my top 20 favourite fragrances of all time. The smoke here is thicker and more peppery than what you'd typically find in Aventus, but I'm just using it as a reference point to help explain the smokiness.

However, if you're not a fan of black licorice, you may find the combination of birch tar and licorice to be slightly off-putting. Despite this, the fragrance is still a smoky, birch-dominant scent with a bit of sweetness coming from the olibanum and licorice. The smoke feels natural, with no abrasiveness or scratchiness, and it's the type of smoke that you want to inhale instead of turning away from.

This scent has an umami smokiness that has moderate performance. However, for some reason, I got a bit nauseated by the licorice note. Maybe I associated something bad with the licorice smell because I didn't have this issue when I first bought it. Additionally, the performance wasn't up to my standards, so I ended up selling my bottle. Nonetheless, I still think this is a fantastic fragrance, and I wanted to buy it at first sniff. If you can find it, I recommend giving it a try.