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

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

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

[Original submission date: 10 April 2008]

In the marvellous CdG Synth series, this one is the one I like least. It’s still a fascinating creation though.

Birch tar is the main ingredient in this fragrance without a doubt. Smells very vintage woody, smoky and slightly metallic.
This takes me back into the summer cabin I used to visit a lot as a child, and the shed that was there. The smell of Garage is strikingly similar.
That woody shed was filled up with dry birch logs, couple of small motorboat engines, some oils plus other chemicals, tools and dry birch switches that we use here in Finland in sauna.
Really, the smell of that shed is bottled right in here.

To me Garage is definitely one of the most evocative fragrances ever. More than an actual wearing, I like to put this on my hands from time to time and let my mind flow to back in the days when everything was exciting and new…

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?

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.

I'd consider this a more palatable version of SMN's Nostalgia - at least it doesn't dry down powdery like that one does. Still, it's a bit of a gimmick - the garage/industrial notes are in there, but not in any real striking sense. It's actually pretty mild stuff compared to CdG's "Odeurs" 53 and 71, and I can't really think of any situation that would call for this one. It has little sillage and weak staying power.

Actually much more wearable than I thought it would be, top notes are a bit harsh, but the dry down is nicely sweet and musty and warmly petrol like. My boyfriend has a thing for big, burly, somewhat dirty, mechanic types and really seems to like this one as well. So it seems it lives up to everything I hoped it would be.

This is not a fragrance - it's a noxious fume. My husband described it when I first applied it as smelling like "stinky plastic packaging," and even a drop of this manufacturing chemical "scent" was so strong that I thought I was going to get high. Smelling it made me want to reach for a gas mask. I still smelled the plastic smell once it dried down, but to be fair, licorice and leather were more detectable once it mellowed out. This has lasting power - I couldn't wash it off no matter how hard I tried. I love unusual scents, but this was too much for me. Maybe not for someone else.

Agreeing with tigruska a mechanic man would like it. It´s dark and doesn´t appeal to me. The fact to create a fragance that smell oils an trucks sounds cool, but the final product really won´t suit anyone:
Smell like oliy motors, grasy tools very concrented in a note of pure dirty oil machine. I wish the gasoline note was more evident like in CDG#3, cause i simply love it. The result, me shauting:
argh! :(

A quite warm and musty garage scent, not cool and damp as one might expect. I detect leather, plastic, oil and gasoline. Perhaps wood and dust as well, concrete? It dries to a sweet, warm, woody scent, almost like licorice, with hints of incense or smoke.

Highly synthetic, I don't know if I like it but it consists of very familiar notes of oil-based chemicals, concrete, etc.

Garage smells exactly like a toolshed: woods, various electric appliances, chemicals, motors, gasoline... A mechanic would probably feel very comfortable wearing Garage! ;)