Comme des Garcons Series 7 Sweet: Spicy Cocoa

26)More challenging than i expected. The beginning is ... yes ...like urine but in the same time attractive. The best part comes after, when the urine smell goes away, it's close ,but not as good as, Anima Ducis.

I suspect this fragrance looked good on paper - people-pleasing chocolate; a low-risk cliché combo of coconut and citrus; a 'unique selling point' in the form of warming spices (coriander) to enhance the warmth of chocolate and coconut with a deeper citrusy tang to enrich the fruits (cardomon) - cheap to achieve and not too original. Yup, very middle-of-the-road and thus must have given enough projected sales to get a tick of approval from the accountants and executives controlling the product development budget. The frag is very 'production line', does what it was designed to do, and it is not for me. Personally, I hate most chocolate (both how it feels in my mouth, cloying, which makes me gag, and the smell of it - I like cocoa so it is something in the process of making chocolate that adds the elements that nauseate me, no idea what). The chocolate I like is very dark over 70% cocoa solids which tastes like very bitter licorice to me. But this is cheap 'own-brand' milk chocolate with less than 30% cocoa in it. Cloying. Gagging. I hate the combination of coconut and citrus. No to lemon, no to lime. I think coconut needs to partner with bitterness to become interesting. Sourness seems to seal the flavour inside coconut so that it is reduced to a linear scent or even a boring monotone. Bitterness seems to open its pores so the deep aromas in coconut flood out. If it had to be a citrus then I think Seville orange peel would be better. But I think what coconut needs in order to sing is to partner something as bitter as earwax and no citrus has that power - the yellow pith in pomegranates or very strong black coffee or absinthe are better ideas. I love spices so yes to coriander, yes to cardomom, but not with these other ingredients. Ugh! For me, it's all wrong. This play-it-safe frag is proof that formulaic fragrances are not guaranteed to succeed. I'd have more respect if someone at the factory had thrown out the rule book and tried combinations based on personal taste instead of actuaries tables. I'd like to try a frag with coffee, coconut, Seville orange peel, pomegranate pith, wormwood, cumin and corriander. And if that sounds too bitter for a 'sweet' fragrance then maybe add a dash of rice wine vinegar with the mild sweet and sour vibe of sushi rice - I like sweet but hate sugariness. Maybe my tastes are too emphatically 'niche' for me to be fair to this mainstream product? I should stop buying such things but I keep saying to myself maybe this time it will be different. Well, I was wrong. Not for me. If you like it then I'm happy for you - if we all had the same tastes life would be boring. Enjoy! :-)

One of the very few fragrances by Comme Des Garcons that I'm not able to dispassionately love. Spicy Cocoa is a chocolate/citrus gourmand with a dissonant/contrasting aspect given by the spices (mainly cardamom). It opens with a an edible accord of cocoa joined by orange and other citruses while cardamom and coriander provide a challenging fecal/sweaty twist that's not exactly what I usually call "successful". The fragrance turns pretty soon into a more conventional and moderately sweet gourmand of little interest. Not completely bad but still pretty far from being my type of fragrance. Rating: 5.5-6/10

Dark chocolate,coriander,cardamon oh yes I love u,I feel like the Maya who were extracting from the seeds of cocoa tree the dark magical liquid. They would have probably blend it with other herbs and that would give this magical result.