cK one Shock for Him (2011)
by Calvin Klein

It smells smooth. Nothing too incredibly jarring. I get the clementine (or just sweet undefined orangy citrus) on top of tobacco cardamom lavender patchouli, in that order. It smells nothing like the bottle looks. This should be caramel colored. I don't get the cherry syrup others sometimes mention. I do feel like it is a bit cardamom unbalanced in the mid. Add to that the cashmeran. Both of those, cardamom and cashmeran have a soft texture, take the two together and you get a sweet olfactory equivalent of a beige cashmere sweater. The closest thing it feels like to me is Tom Ford Noir Extreme. Projection was close, longevity was slightly below average.

Not my style, I won't buy it. But in my idea, this fragrance is pretty good. The bottle is atrocious, so -1 for that. It is a great value, often under $20. +2 It feels like a begrudging thumbs up. Value here is large, as this smells much better than the small cost it is currently going for.

I absolutely love it on paper strip and the first minutes on my skin. It's a tobacco gourmand, yes - but never too sweet. The opening is perfectly unisex. Later it dries down to a more masculine scent - a beautiful woody tobacco and spices + some lavender and greenery - I still could pull it off and it's quite nice on me, and I'd gladly wear it if I had it, but I don't feel the need to buy it.
Would be great to smell it on a man - so getting it for your significant other and then snagging some spritzes here and there seems like a really valid option indeed!

If natural perfumery were veganism, this would be junk food. The sort of thing you may crave even though it's bad for you.

It's a gungy-sweet, high calorie mix of concrete, furry pine, fat and tobacco; clever and enticing but none too healthy.

***

Great opening as others have said. Much like Burberry London but this is Chocolate Tobacco whereas London is Vanilla Tobacco with some hints of pine. Both are exceptional.

Dries down to nothing within an hour or two on me. 6.7 oz can be purchased for around the same price as 3.4 oz, so look carefully at what you're getting. You'll definitely want the big bottle.

Insane to make this a flanker of CK One. They could have called it "CK NOT One" because it has zero to do with One and should have been called "Dark Seduction" or something. This is by far the most interesting CK fragrance in many years.

Definitely worth the blind buy. If you don't like it, I guarantee the first person you give it to will. A crowd pleaser for sure but not for days over 65°F (18°C).

I've long known that CK One Shock for Him has had its fans, but the brand's history and the bottle design don't exactly inspire enthusiasm, so I took my first sniff with some skepticism. Now I'm a believer.

We've seen a glut of gourmand-y tobacco fragrances over the past two decades, and this is one of the few very good ones. Beyond its somewhat curious and brief (but not unpleasant) opening, CK One Shock offers a rich and intoxicating blend of spiced cocoa and particularly well-rendered tobacco. It's elegant and warm and inviting, sweet without becoming cloying (it is, however, heavy enough that it's best suited to cool weather).

If they'd given this fragrance a different name and put it into a more suitable bottle, this might've been a contender and might not have ended up in the bargain bin wilderness like so many other CK fragrances. The upside is that it's now a boon to bargain hunters.