Perhaps the nicest thing about having 100 years of modern perfumery behind you is the ability to trace the thematic evolution of popular scent profiles. It's as easy to connect the dots between Skin Bracer, Caron Pour Homme, and Agua Lavanda Puig, as to follow the gilded path from Grey Flannel to anything "fresh" and "green" from the last twenty-five years. The fact that one could miss genuinely unique and distinguished entries is the only possible downside, as those rarest of rare diamonds-in-the-rough sometimes have an elusive way about them. Which brings me to Le Troisième Homme, Caron's "Third Man" in its esteemed masculine range.
Released in 1985, this brilliant fougère stands aloof, safely away from a myriad of woody-fresh fougères of that era, although I contend it's loosely book-ended by Pierre Cardin Pour Monsieur cologne and Creed's Bois du Portugal, with Guerlain's Héritage further afield. All parallels aside, comparing Le Troisième Homme to anything misses the point: this fragrance is one of a kind, and its nose is undoubtedly the sort of slightly-eccentric woman who voluntarily reads Ada and Beautiful Losers and plays Fruchtchen! for fun.
Le Troisième Homme, created in a Givaudan laboratory by a Japanese perfumer named Akiko Kamei, takes a yuzu-tinged citrus and lavender note and enlivens it with a fresh, cool, almost-lactonic woody-floral accord of surprising strength and tenacity, thanks to synthetics that extend the lavender well past its sell-by date. Its herbal coolness is flanked by a judicious touch of oakmoss, and forms a subtle tension against a warm and musky base. Coriander lends a feral edge to clean jasmine and an anisic, ephemerally-camphorous base of cedar, vanilla, and sandalwood.
Although its drydown is lovely (and dare I say it, sexy too), I'm more enamored with LTH's champagne-fizz top. It's comprised of nothing special, yet somehow smells new, unprecedented, successfully inventive. A standard arrangement of orange, lemon, lavender, and oakmoss is passable on paper, but in practice here it astonishes me, as it smells of nothing else, and smells very, very good. You could blame it on the angelic touch of aldehydes in the first five seconds, or perhaps the liqueur-like dulcitude of syrupy orange and lemon as they mingle with a tempered version of Pour un Homme's unmatched lavender. Whatever it is, it works, and the somewhat-questionable sheer musk that plagues other Caron masculines, Yatagan in particular, is right at home here as well. Nice work.
It took me four years to get around to trying this scent, due in no small part to the scattered reviews about it in online forums. I'd come close to a blind-buy, and then read more about it and get spooked. People have the most divergent opinions about Third Man, with comments ranging from "Tom Selleck with his shirt open," to "a great scent to wear on Easter, with its association of flowers and candies." Some say it's too feminine, too "pretty," while others claim it's almost unisex, but in some ways too masculine for the ladies to pull off. Still others suggest that it's completely unisex. Having finally worn it myself, I can say that I fall firmly into the last camp, finding LTH neither overtly masculine, nor overwhelmingly feminine, but somewhere in the middle, a terrain inhabited by everyone, from the girliest of girly-girls, to the butchest lesbians, the strongest archetypical silent types, to the classiest bisexual Hollywood players.
Ironically enough, virtually no one wears it. Their loss - I'm definitely keeping it in my rotation for the rest of my life.