Year: 1999
Nose: Jean-Michel Duriez
My review is based on the original version, although I am given to understand that the recent reissue is quite similar to the original one (oh I wished other houses did that too). Yohji Homme is one of the 2 or 3 "cult" scents of contemporary perfumery (say, post-2000s) which is highly worth its fame and praise. It is, in fact and without doubts, the unique and timeless masterpiece everyone talks about. If you read Turin's guide to perfumes, his review of Yohji Homme is perfect. Like a really few else recent fragrances (I think of M7, a couple of Costume National, Cuiron), it basically smells like nothing else: just pure, white, futuristic synthetic elegance. Yohji is basically a sophisticated woody-spicy scent, with a transparent, polished but warm and dense texture of gourmand notes, slightly creamy and powdery, with also something floral (it smells like iris to me, apart from the lavender note) elegantly contrasting with a dark, boozy subtle undertone of licorice. Above all of this, a rarefied white fog of pure, artificial freshness, some odd but tremendously fascinating plummy and plushy abstract notes providing and irresistible and refined sort of "white glow" all over. What makes Yohji a masterpiece, besides smelling so (so!) great, is the incredible perfection of the composition: it is a complex scent with a lot of echoes, notes, nuances, from spices to sweet notes, a lot of "new" and never-smelled-before going on all over, but still it is so thin, compact, subtle and transparent, almost "zen" and peaceful in a way. It is like that new wave of experimental "cuisine" with those chemist-chefs which stuff recipes and lots of complex flavours in tiny pills. But apart from all of this, it's enough to say that Yohji smells simply gorgeous, addictive, compelling and unique like a really few other scents.
9/10
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