parfums*PARFUMS Series 6 Synthetic: Garage (2004)
by Comme des Garçons

Funny how everyone has their own memory and version of what a garage smells like. This immediately took me back the dusty, musky smell of my parents' garage when it rained. Rubber, brake pads and smells emitted from steam off the hood as the car rattled after being shut down.

No one else has mentioned - and maybe it's just me - but about 2 hours after application the heaviness of the synthetic garage smell was gone and what was left was a lightly citrus/floral, almost 'fresh' type of accord with the slightest hint of what came before it. In fact I initially forgot that it was Garage on my hand and for the life of me couldn't remember what I'd sprayed on my hand.

Fun for novelty purposes, but as Foetidus points out, even people who smell like garages may not want to smell like garages. The base accord isn't so unique as to make it worth a couple hours of smelling like a garage. The entire fragrance is fascinating, and I love that CdG has the balls to actually retail theoretical exercises, so thumbs up.

Notes (luckyscent) :Laurel aldehyde, traces of kerosene, leather notes, plastic floral notes, vetiver acetate, Chinese cedarwood

It smells like brake pads.

My dad used to sell/deliver auto parts when I grew up (those big large white trucks, filled with belts, spark plugs, etc - he drove that for a living). The industrial smell of those auto parts is permanently engraved on my consciousness. I half expected for Garage to give me an oil/gas/lubricant note, but no it was PURE brake pads. Fresh out of their cardboard box in all of their shiny, sticky, metallic smell. Most mechanic garages I have smelled smell like lubricants and oil but a few very well kept mechanic shops or auto parts stores smell just like this.

I wore it once, at night to a smoky bar. When I applied it, the top notes were extremely sharp (as I expected) but didn't go into headache-inducing territory. During the night I ran into two people I know. No comments: good or bad. Maybe it was the average sillage and they didn't smell it? Maybe they just thought my scent was something else in the bar?

In the mid dry down its plastic notes are quite self-overwhelming and it does that olfactory trick that Odeur 71 does where the smell of the fragrance actually sucks all of the oxygen from around your body - so that your personal space becomes actually 'absent' of smell. Anti- smell. I was grinning to myself, because I love it when scents do that.

Will I buy a full bottle of this? Not sure yet. I need to try the other four scents in the Series to answer that. I'm going to wait a while and test again.

Very accurate description of a garage except there's no rubber smell of tires. Kerosine. Glass everything else but I don't get any rubber! Other than an artform, why would one make a fragrance depicting such mechanical smells?

Wow, you can’t get anymore accurate than this!

Engine oil, dust, concrete, paint fumes, metal and rubber can be detected. This is sooooooooo avant-garde that there’s no way I can wear it myself but, conceptually, this is brilliant stuff.

This smells like the guy who services my Camry – I guess he’s been saving lots of money on fragrances. I get a little kerosene, a little plastic and a lot of leather from CDG’s Garage. It really does smell like a garage, but I don’t think it’s as interesting as Nostalgia, the Santa Maria Novelle version of this same concept. I think I miss that air compressor note that the SMN version has, but the CDG version doesn’t have. To me a garage has to have the air compressor smell or it’s not a real garage. Actually, I don’t know why anyone besides my mechanic would want to smell like this, and I’m not even sure he wants to smell the way he does. And on the outside chance that he would actually pay for a fragrance like this, he would do better wearing Nostalgia because it comes more fully equipped with an air compressor. Garage is all right, but it’s nothing special, except for its longevity – that is quite good.

I love this fragrance from the moment it comes out of the admittedly fecky sprayer. It is gloriously "mechanical," with smells of petrol, oil and machinery in equal measure. The dry-down is redolent of Bulgari Black, but without the softness of the Bulgari. I'm sure no one near me will like smelling it, which could be problematic, as it has powerful sillage and lasting power (eight hours and counting), but it is so unusual that I cannot resist it.