Cabochard Eau de Toilette (Grès)

Few fragrances have endured more criticism than Bernard Chant's Cabochard (1959). It's a midcentury animalic chypre that has seen sixty-three years of shifting social values and cultural norms, yet it remains on shelves. In my opinion, it still smells good. 

Cabochard sits somewhere between Balmain's Jolie Madame (1953) and Guerlain's Chant d'Arômes (1962), but it's most compared to Chant's own Aramis for Men (1966). What do I think it smells like? To me it resembles Jacomo's 1978 feminine, Silences, a super-green floral chypre, but mixed with a hefty splash of Aramis. Silences is largely forgotten, which surprises me because there aren't many perfumes that are greener or eerier. It's evocative of a foggy lakeside morning in April, full of green tall grasses, mosses, and bittersweet wildflowers poking through the verdant murk. Cabochard is suprisingly green and ever-so-slightly more floral, but it's brightened with a massive bergamot, lime rind, and lemon juice accord brushed with Chant's signature fizzy aldehydes. It's nice stuff, and in keeping with the unofficial tradition of old-school feminines, it's eminently wearable for men. 

Has reformulation ruined it? Well, I haven't smelled the original (few people have), but I find little fault with this bowtie EDT version that I'm reviewing. Sure, longevity is brief (five hours), and it's no longer de rigueur to wear it, but it smells like it was made in 1959, and that's good enough for me. Look for either the EDT or the EDP. 

Cabotine Gold (Parfums Grès)

One could argue that the practice of discerning "notes" in perfumes is overrated, but when something as bad as Cabotine Gold comes around it becomes clear that note recognition is part of what enjoying perfumery is all about, or more specifically, what contextualizing scents is about, more than just liking or disliking them. Contextualization is part of making an informed decision about whether or not we like something. If we recognize a natural or synthetic material (this smells like eugenol / this smells like aldehydes), then this keys us into what we know and what we think. 

Cabotine Gold is a perfume so pathetic in both construct and effect that few words can adequately relate the sense of dread it gives me, as almost nothing in it smells like a natural or synthetic perfume material. It's a chemical hairball of a scent, rife with disjointed elements and sporadic movements, an experiment lying on a table somewhere with its severed nerves still twitching up at the moon. If you're a fan of the original, and yearn to try one of its flankers, I say skip this one. It will actually put you off the original, and probably off the entire brand.

I guess there is one - just one - kinda, sorta nice thing I can say about it. Its mandarin opening is juicy and rather naturalistic. I've read that mandarin is a note which esteemed perfumers used to falsify by taking regular orange oils and sandwiching their molecules between tiny dollops of galbanum and rectified birch tar. I doubt I've ever encountered one of these reconstructions, but wish I could say it's what I'm smelling here. There is no cold-smokiness, but there is, for all of ten brief seconds, a sweet citrus punch that suggests Asian fruit. Then it's gone, and I mean completely, totally, utterly gone. Apply in high heat, because if you use CG on anything resembling a winter day that top will probably last far fewer than ten seconds, and your torture will begin all the sooner.

All that ensues is catastrophic: first a hairspray accord that literally smells like Aqua Net, followed by weirdly disheveled, digitally-pixelaled analogs of jasmine and patchouli, which I'm only able to list due to a rather forced sense of sweetness (must be the listed "jasmine" note), and a musty, oily soot note (must be the supposed "patchouli"). So what we really end up with is sweet'n sour Aqua Net. Bring on the laundry musk Frebreze-styled base, and the awfulness is complete. Now imagine all of these elements are globbed together in a dense ball of smell, rolling downhill in a manner that rapidly unravels these attempts at florals and spices and just leaves the shrieky laundry musk blaring away unhappily for seven hours, and you have a sense of how CG moves through the day. Cabotine Gold is the very definition of a "nasty floral," much more so than its predecessor, if I do say.

Cabotine (Parfums Grès)

I'll keep this short and sweet, as I'm reserving a fuller review of this sort of scent for that which Cabotine copied - Creed's Fantasia de Fleurs. My belief is that Creed does green florals better than anyone. Still, this once-expensive French designer perfume is a real beauty, and in my opinion is deserving of a comeback. I gave Country Chic, Alien, and CK Shock for Her second (and third) tries the other day, but Cabotine was the first thing I tried, and remains the only scent that I genuinely liked. 

Call me a contrarian, but this does not deserve the label "nasty floral." It doesn't deserve accolades either, but almost nothing does. Cabotine's fresh ginger and hyacinth opening is made a bit odd by extra-fatty aldehydes, which seem to illuminate and aerate its denser floral drydown. The initial burst of Chinese-style ginger is particularly bright and clean. Hints of hyacinth keep things fresh as ylang-ylang, jasmine, rose, and lily notes emerge and intensify, resulting in a pretty floral that is mercifully light on Calone.

There are stages in Cabotine where the scent veers away from fine fragrance and into room-freshener territory, but this is a $16 perfume, after all. What saves it for me is its sheer ginger, jasmine, and rose notes, which seem to presage the aquatic jasmine in Calice Becker's Tommy Girl. Cabotine is quite nice, and I see a bottle in my future. Speaking of which - I really love the bottle. Yeah, it's a touch feminine and has a crazy green plastic cap, but when I pretend the cap is glass it strikes me as being a uniquely modern design. Eh, what can I say? I'm a weirdo.