Rouge.

Nathalie Gracia-Cetto designed Rouge for Comme des Garçons in 2020. The brief was simple on paper, incense, roots, woods, but the execution hinges on a single unexpected ingredient: beetroot. It's the kind of note most perfumers would sidestep. CdG leaned in. The campaign, shot under Jordan Hemingway's artistic direction, frames the fragrance as something elemental. Seductive incense entangled with vegetal roots. Ardent woods set boldly aflame.

Beetroot in perfumery is a statement. It's not sweet in the way raspberry is sweet. It's not green in the way galbanum is green. It smells like soil, like mineral, like the actual earth, and it carries a faint, almost medicinal sharpness that most noses don't know how to place. Rouge pairs that rawness with frankincense and labdanum, two resins that could easily dominate but instead bend toward the beetroot's gravity. The result is a fragrance that smells less composed than discovered. Like someone found the right combination and didn't smooth out the edges.

Rouge opens sharp. The Indonesian ginger and pink pepper arrive together, bright, tingly, almost aggressive in the first minute. It's the calm before something. Then the geranium leaf arrives, cool and green, cutting through the spice like a window opening in a warm room. The beetroot doesn't announce itself. It emerges slowly, earthy and mineral, taking space from the geranium until the heart smells like soil and leaf in equal measure. The frankincense is patient. It waits until hour three to fully arrive, then owns the room, smoky, resinous, warm without being sweet. Labdanum and patchouli settle underneath, grounding everything in a dark, resinous drydown that stays close to the skin but refuses to leave. By hour eight, there's still something there. Not projecting, not loud. Just present, like the smell of a room after the fire's gone out.

Rouge occupies a specific corner of contemporary perfumery, it's not quite avant-garde, not quite mainstream. The beetroot note is the kind of thing that divides a room: either it's the most interesting thing you've smelled in years, or it's too weird to wear. That division is, arguably, the point. CdG has always made fragrances for people who want something that smells like it was made on purpose, not by committee. Rouge is for that person.