REVIEW: Gaultier²

Gaultier² is easily one of the oddest scents I've ever encountered. The scent is supposedly meant to be a shared scent for lovers, hence the paired magnetic bottles and so forth. On that front, I can't see the scent as a success. This doesn't seem at all sexy to me. Gaultier² instead seems a rather solitary scent. It's terribly evocative, smelling of those cluttered, musty bedrooms filled with musty clothes and decades-old makeup (that old makeup note is well-known to anyone with even a passing familiarity with Jean Paul Gaultier Classique) and a cloud of evaporated perfume and cigarette smoke. There is life in Gaultier², but not writhing, active, passionate, dual life as Monsieur Gaultier would like to propose. Instead, it is departed life. Airless and bit mournful yet still somehow familiar and comforting, Gaultier² is as close as any fragrance has come to recreating the smell of cleaning out a dead loved one's closet. This isn't a slam against the scent. In fact, I find it so very engaging on an intellectual level. Frankly, the irony of a fragrance that's meant to be the ultimate smell of sexual partnership reminding me of a funeral home makes me smile - and, well, sort of worry about myself, but those are my issues.

Gaultier² strikes me as the sweet amber-musk base of Classique stripped of the big floral-and-powder top and heart notes. Sales associates will claim there are only three notes - amber, vanilla, and musk - but I get a little touch of cinnamon, and there are the faintest tart notes at the very outset at well. It sort of smells like someone took sugar cookie dough and mashed it into modeling clay, diluting the fatty, sweet sablé with the earthy smell, then baked it. It's not quite edible; it doesn't blow up into a full-on oriental explosion, which is a mercy as it has good volume. This is not at all a stretch for Gaultier, but at least the scent is smooth and wearable and like nothing anyone else has released lately and like no other scent concept, so the scent gets points for that.

As for the unisex question, I can't really see this as either masculine or feminine. This is what rooms smell like to me, not people. If I smell someone who smells like this, I tend to think, Did you pull those clothes out of the back of the closet? Are those a dead man's clothes? Did you not wash that after you bought it at the thrift shop? It's so strange. I can't say I would ever wear Gaultier², but the smell of it and the images it calls forth just endless fascinates me. It has to be easily the strangest release of the year.

That's the scent: I kept thinking of which non-Gaultier scent Gaultier² recalled to me, and Musc Ravageur is exactly the one. Gaultier² is a dull brass to Musc Ravageur's brilliant gold, which might not be a bad thing as the Malle can be too much of a good thing. Gaultier² is, of course, drier, duskier. It's sort of like if Serge Lutens made Musc Ravageur...

I am starting to think that me and Col are the only two that like this stuff.

1) MFfan310 famously loves this stuff.
2) musclegod007 just wrote that he also love it.
3) Please don't take it that I hate it. I just find it... bizarre. But bizarre in a makes-me-think way.

Habanita! There's another one, in addition to Musc Ravageur! That whole clouds-of-smoke-and-amber thing was reminiscent of something, but I just could not, for the life of me, figure out what. Thank you for putting it right for me! Gaultier² is not at all the dark, overwrought scent Habanita is, of course, but more a stripped-down, 21st century reinterpretation of it. There really seems to be that feeling of smoke somewhere in it, but it's very discreet.

For all the "Gaultier² reminds me of Musc Ravageur" and "Gaultier² reminds me of Habanita" I've posted, I will say that, in a way, the scent is rather unique (for a fashion designer scent) in it's solid, indivisible, monolithic character. There are almost no seams to the fragrance, and it changes very little. Eventually most of the mustiness goes away after several hours, and it smells like fairly straightforward amber. This lack of complexity is pretty much the reason people will or will not buy this scent, and the Gaultier folks are taking a huge gamble on this. I have to at least applaud a big design house for taking a risk on releasing a scent with such a risky proposition.