Unreal: Comme des Garçons Dry Clean

Comme des Garçons doesn't do anything quite like anybody else, certainly not fragrances. They have a large number of them, mostly grouped into eclectic collections: Sherbet, Leaves, Red, Incense, Sweet, and so on. Their sixth collection was called Synthetic, composed of scents that deliberately didn't smell like anything in the natural world: Skai is (putatively) the smell of man-made leather, and Garage, Tar, and Soda are self-explanatory. The containers are as synthetic as their contents: a translucent plastic bottle looking for all the world like household cleaner or disinfectant spray, containing a black plastic bag which gradually shrivels up as the scent is used.

When I was young, there was a small strip mall just around the corner from my house: it held a convenience store, a bank, a supermarket, possibly a couple of other business that I've forgotten, and a dry-cleaner's, where I would go from time to time to pick up my parents' cleaning. I loved the smell of the shop; warm, steamy, solventy, the very essence of clean.

As you will see from my recent Twitter postings, I've been wearing Comme des Garçons' Dry Clean a lot lately. I originally ordered the sample because I assumed it would smell at least something like that shop around the corner. You'd think from reading the official list of notes (ozone, aldehydes, nail polish, bay leaf, rose oxide, metallic incense, dissolvent vapours, gaiacwood) that it would smell like a dry-cleaner's--I mean, "dissolvent vapours"? Bingo! Alas, no. With the usual CdG perversity, Dry Clean smells instead like....

You're a scientist. A successful one: you own your own lab! It has racks of bottles large and small containing hundreds and hundreds of chemicals: most of them have no smell, but some of them do. The lab is nicely outfitted: lots of stainless steel and glass and surfaces made of Corian or some other hard, smooth, inert plastic. In fact, nothing at all from the natural world, nothing that could hold chemical smells: it's all manufactured and easily cleaned.

This is lucky, because you are a clean freak. So one day you set about cleaning your lab (by yourself, because nobody else can be trusted to get it just right). You get some harsh, caustic powdered cleanser with a lemon scent, and you scrub and scrub and scrub, so hard that you practically vapourize a layer of metal and glass and Corian into the air. When you're done, the whole lab is perfectly bright and shiny. You climb into the hazmat shower and wash away the sweat of your exertion with punishingly strong soap that smells as faintly as possible of synthetic roses but mostly of soap, and you put on a freshly laundered lab coat that bears the odour of commercial laundry detergent.

And now you and the lab smell like Dry Clean.