A Primordial New Fragrance from Comme des Garcons Parfums

"For Antoine Maisondieu, the nose behind To Vetiver, Comme des Garçons Parfums ' latest 'pebble' fragrance, the weight was doubled - this was the last completed perfume of Christian Astuguevieille, CDG Parfums' pioneering creative director of three decades, composed in devotion to the material he loved above all others."

"Maisondieu had worked alongside Astuguevieille on 17 Comme des Garçons Parfums fragrances over some 20 years - a creative partnership he describes as the greatest pleasure of his career. "You cannot hide yourself with Christian," he says of working with someone sensitive to scent. What Astuguevieille demanded was a kind of creative annihilation: to unlearn the classical compositions of their training and approach each material as if for the first time."

""A perfumer is like a musician," Maisondieu reflects, "he has old melodies in his mind always. Christian undid that completely." He was, in Maisondieu's formulation, "classical and punk at the same time" - someone who could hear beauty in a composition and then insist it needed "a splash of soy sauce" so that it was never "too beautiful.""

"For To Vetiver, Maisondieu found his way in through saltiness - a mineral, aquatic quality latent within vetiver that he drew out by loading the top notes with black pepper, dosing more of it than in CDG's Black Pepper fragrance, which he also worked on as the nose. "The pepper gives a saltiness in the smell," he explains. It is this push and pull - between the pious and the unexpected, the ancestral and the modern - that gives the perfume its secular mysticism."

Vetiver is presented as a foundational perfumery ingredient with deep cultural and spiritual resonance. A long creative partnership shaped a method of unlearning classical composition and approaching each material as if newly encountered. The perfumer is compared to a musician with ingrained melodies, while the creative director disrupted those habits to prevent overly beautiful results. For To Vetiver, the scent is built by emphasizing a mineral, aquatic saltiness inherent in vetiver. Black pepper is used more heavily than in a prior pepper-focused fragrance to create the salt effect. The resulting balance between pious and unexpected elements produces a secular mysticism that interrupts devotional pull with contemporary jolts.

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