Odeur 53

Body spray, followed by...Nothing. Really smells like nothing. Slight takeout smell? Maybe plastic container? Very faint plastic smell. Leaves behind a very faint body spray smell after it dries. Seems like a waste of money Maybe I am nose blind to it 🤣 I sprayed so much of this trying to smell it...I'm sorry...

A middle aged "Janet from finance" who buys her perfume from Ross' discount section and spends all day near a copy machine. The description says "Floral Woody Musk ... features Metallic notes, Clay, Pebbles and Sand." The "Floral Woody Musk" is very prominent and the "metallic notes" begin to come out as the overbearing Floral Woody Musk dies out. Idk what I was expecting, but it was definitely not this. From the "what people say" here it says "Not suitable for those who prefer traditional scents" um, no. it smells quite generic, again, the 'floral woody musk' is very prominent. "Unique and abstract scent" no.. no. "Sterile, industrial-clean atmosphere" maybe like 1% that gradually grows to like 5%. I think I wanted to be overwhelmed by the "liminal" metallic coldness, but instead it's just another generic floral woody musk with a hint of a "liminal/metallic" vibe - I guess I was expecting something very different (as a lot of people claimed it to be). I also bought into the fragrance notes being completely devoid of any floral, wood, or musk notes which are very obviously there. The opening leans very feminine, but grows more masculine as those metallic notes come through. One thing that I will give it is that it is very reminiscent of the 90s. Overall disappointed by how generic it smells - the dominant "floral woody musk" and not enough metallic/coldness/uniqueness. The reviews made this out to be like something you've never smelled in your life. It also gave me a headache.

My ADHD brought me to this scent! Over the summer I picked up a shirt from Carhartt that happened to a part of their Fire Resistant (FR) line. I wouldn't normally go for this but it was on sale. Upon opening the bag I was instantly hit with the scent of plastic, metal, almost a laboratory sterile smell. The smell was likely a result of the fire resistant properties of the materials. Regardless, I was obsessed! I couldn't stop smelling the shirt, to the point I didn't want to wash it. After a few Google searches I found Oduer 53. I quickly ordered a sample as I wasn't sure this would be what I was after. After it arrived I was blown away by the fragrance. It's was about 90% of what I was looking for but with more complexity. Unfortunately I was leaving the US and couldn't order a full bottle. After weeks of looking in Asia I couldn't find anyone to deliver to me. I luckily had a trip to Italy this past week and was able to secure a bottle. I don't think this is for everyone but it absolutely gets people talking. It really does strike people differently. I get the plastic, sterile notes, my wife is the only one that said asphalt right away. Overall it's a very creative and unique fragrance and will be my daily for a while.

It's like Odeur 71 mixed with sunscreen

This was my first ever CDG perfume, I blind-bought it 15 years ago when I was so hyped for their abstract and experimental ideas in fashion and perfumery. On my skin, Odeur 53 was way more simple than I expected. It's definitely inorganic-smelling, evoking ozonic and clean scents. But the best way I can describe it is like the scent of a futuristic laundry. It has that particular smell of a laundry detergent and steam. Overall it's a very avant-garde, abstract perfume, with a very nice packaging design (check out Marc Atlan, he is a genius). Made me feel cozy and it's absolutely safe for work. Longevity is moderate and sillage is intimate, but the bottle is very big so it's worth the price in my opinion. If you're looking for something truly out-of-the-box I would recommend Odeur 71, which a friend of mine had and it smelled crazy (in a fascinating way). Absolutely liminal. I made a separate review of it. :)

Have to really breathe in deeply to get any scent with this one…it is SO subtle. It changes rapidly on my skin. Sunscreen -> something pickled (only lasts a moment or so) -> industrial tape/glue -> something a little sour -> back to tape? But not at all unpleasant. It does feel liminal. It does feel void of life. It does feel sterile, until you give it a while on skin and it becomes a very light atmospheric scent. Overall, really pretty but too subtle.

i tried this out last night and today and it smells like nothing to me... it really highlights the scent of ones nearby it though, the sample i got was packed with a sample of dannams mooncake and thats all i smell everytime i spray from this bottle. but overall really dissapointing

Musty sunscreen and humid air

It’s so soft that all I can really detect is a figgy ozonic note and, on the base end, the smell of wet concrete or clay. Truly a joke fragrance, $175 bottle of water. 0 out of 5.

Trying a sample and on paper this was interesting. On skin though it really bloomed. It's a weiiiird fragrance, truly unisex but not offensive in it's weirdness. This feels like a backrooms liminal space perfume if there ever was one. It smells like the 90s, pink hand soap, a pristine pool, and rubber flip flops but good.

Ozeki's and Jassca99's comments are perfect descriptions. To me on my skin, it has almost an incensey labdanum glow to it. I could be using the wrong adjectives but It reminds me of notes I smell in a lot of caeleste's perfumes. Has a similar everything everywhere all at once vibe that principalities has but on a way more toned back scale. I honestly really like it. Very calming. Reminds me of Grandma6

Hot girl at a rock quarry

Forgot to add: Comme des Garçons, Odeur 53 is the scent of the tiniest bit of fishscale cocaine stuck to the spot where the adhesive used to be on a new AMEX Black Card.

Comme des Garçons, Odeur 53 is the scent of: • a new Barbie doll’s skin; Charli XCX’s song “Card Declined” — all the lyrics, but only the music from the second half; a 5% cerulean halftone overlay • Chanel’s most expensive powder foundation, if it was made of the dust scraped off a book hidden deep in the Vatican’s secret archives • Gwen Stefani’s song “Bubble Pop Electric” • Sue the T. rex, from the Field Museum in Chicago, if she was made of solid chrome and not bones • musk, but underwater in the Marianas Trench • the Upper East Side of Manhattan during a blackout caused by a rainstorm that started an electrical fire • what I would wear if I was on a cocktail date at 1:30am at Beauty & Essex with a mysterious and sexy ass man, and I just knew we were going to fuck 5/5 — but I would only wear this at nighttime, preferably in the late spring/summer when it’s still above 70 degrees, and ONLY when I plan on being in an intimate (not just sexually) setting.

As intended, this is a completely innocuous, nondescript fragrance. The spirit of a bar of Lever 2000 (or Mitchums unscented deodorant) and tinny recycled air. Cubicle-inspired ennui. Obviously not fresh, but I would even hesitate to call it clean. Sterile. It’s not futuristic, but rather contemporary. It’s a scent to wear when you don’t want to smell like nothing, but you also don’t want to smell like something. The concept of this scent is making me laugh, not in a derisive way, but… just how paradoxical, minimal, and devoid of life it is. It’s not awful. It’s not great. It’s exactly what it needs to be, and it makes me feel nothing. Intriguing, but a novelty.

At first, it smelled like straight-up nuclear laundry detergent, which I actually loved. But by the third try, it started stinking of canned tomatoes and bar soap

I thought comme de garçons frags weren't really for me until i tried this one. The people calling this a quarter of a fragrance are kind of right but thats what makes it so interesting. It's very intimate and hit my nose as more of a texture than a scent. Similar to the sensation you get when you exit a plane and the first breeze that hits your nose makes it clear that you are in a new environment. It reminds me of how my skin smells when it's covered in hot sand and drying ocean water with slight remnants of sunscreen. But it's is such a blurry fog that really only alludes to things and refuses direct categorisation. It gives you a sense of deja vu without the means to place it. Avant garde yet wearable.

Comme des Garcons 53 has a clean ocean breeze scented hand soap aroma with subtle mineral clay. This doesn't smell dry or so earthy. Just a little powdery, not necessarily dusty. Not like clay powder but the scent of the end-product that was molded using clay powder. That lingering scent with an ocean-breeze soapy freshness and the added scent of wet rocks. Maybe the metallic notes is what comes off as sea breeze to me. It's not sharp at all and I like it. Something in it smells bodily and human. It's not salty but smells like skin that's been active, a little like spit too in a good way. A little mild tea in a clay mug. Can't stop smelling it because it's very interesting, but still wearable and still pleasant. Pretty moderate in projection and can be smelled for 4-5 hours indoors before having to sniff close. In humid hot weather, it disappears and is barely discernible even if sniffed up close which tells me this would be perfect on a moderately cool day in spring and fall.

I absolutely love it. It's metallic, a bit rubbery, industrial, clean but not fresh, futuristic, avant-garde. For me a gender neutral scent. It doesn't evoke emotions in me and makes me think very clearly. I like that. A first one of that kind.

First, what the perfume is about. What Odeur 53 is about is not the "53 inorganic ideas" its marketing proclaims—nor a single molecule as such. Its true subject is the function of transparency that one dominant material, hedione, pushes into the foreground. The fragrance takes the very mechanism that makes modern perfume read as expensive, airy, and radiant, peels it from the flower, and exhibits it on its own. The house calls this an anti-perfume. Look at the structure, and it is the opposite: an over-concentrated perfume—a hyper-perfume. Hedione is among the most important materials in the history of perfumery for carrying transparent floral radiance. Its commercial debut was Eau Sauvage (Dior, 1966, Roudnitska), at roughly 2.5%. Its concentration then rose across the following decades—about 12.6% in N°19 (1971), 26% in Cristalle, 40% in L'Eau par Kenzo (1996)—culminating in the transparency aesthetic of the 1990s. Odeur 53's reported ~65% is frequently cited as the high-water mark of the trend. And here a paradox runs through the work. The official claim of "no florals" is literally true—no natural essences are used. To the nose, however, the claim becomes perverse: the material pushed dominantly to the front is the abstraction of floral radiance itself. The figure is best read as a share of the compound, not the bottle—the mass of any eau de toilette is mostly ethanol. What matters is that hedione dominates the part that actually smells. So what do I smell? A flower that is not there. Not jasmine exactly, but the luminous abstraction of jasmine: the air where the flower ought to be. The official rhetoric points toward metal, solvents, inorganic matter. My nose keeps returning elsewhere. Again and again, the fragrance resolves into hedione—not necessarily the molecule itself, but the transparent floral radiance for which it stands. The remaining materials—aldehydes, metallic notes, ozonic facets, an Iso E–type woodiness, musks—do perceptual work of their own; they handle the "inorganic" gesture. But none rises above a scratch against the haze spread across the foreground. The fragrance's notorious evanescence—gone in minutes—issues from the same structure. Place at the center a single material that is highly diffusive but possesses no body, and the scent dissolves into the air the moment it rises. Hedione has always been a means in perfumery—the invisible architecture, the air around the flower, a supporting player at 2 to 40%. Odeur 53 turns the means into the end, stripping the logic of transparency that underwrites modern perfume from the flower and displaying it bare. This is the gesture of the readymade—to exhibit the frame in place of the painting. And the copy itself—"53 inorganic ideas," "headspace research"—is a constituent of the work. The gap between the telling (53) and the foregrounded operation (1) is precisely the crux. One may call it an aesthetic of ma, of negative space, but that is retrospective poetic rhetoric, not the structure's driving cause. The two axes do not reconcile. As something to wear, the work is thin, evanescent, closer to an idea than to a smell. But to call it, glibly, a failure is to beg the question. That word presupposes that the aim of wearing is pleasure—and that very premise is what the work places in dispute. The term must be changed. This is not failure in wear but a kind of withdrawal from it. Yet I will not adopt the inverse reading either—that it succeeds in refusing pleasure. That reading is unfalsifiable. If every shortfall in wear can be recast as an "intended refusal," then the experience of wearing can never again function as counter-evidence against the work. That is the very operation by which conceptual art immunizes itself against aesthetic judgment, and a rigorous critic ought rather to resist it. The scent recedes when worn—and whether that is failure or refusal cannot be decided from wear alone. And that very undecidability is the work's subject. The non-reconciliation of the two axes is not a defect; it is the structure of the work itself. That, ultimately, is why Odeur 53 is not an anti-perfume at all. It does not negate perfumery; it isolates one of perfumery's central operations and magnifies it to the point where it becomes visible as an operation. If one must assign a score, the 3 out of 10 as something worn and the 8 as concept must not be averaged. They are answers to different questions, and the instant they are added and halved, the very question the work presses upon us disappears.

I don't like this one as much as 71, but it's still good. I get the sand and plasticky notes, and the metallic isn't too strong. Clean but not fresh. There's a sort of odd flowery note I didn't expect, but I'm not upset about it.

It’s like futuristic, new human smell. It’s extremely close to the skin, but it’s like a treat for myself. I tried this on in the evening and could still faintly smell it on my skin after sleeping. It’s cool, abstract, and clean in such a unique way. I can’t get over how much I like it.

chlorine static alcohol suncreen. very cold light scent

mystifyingly cold, so bare-smelling, almost sexual. comme fragrances are always so robotic and mysterious! love this one. makes me feel like an ancient volcanic goddess, pissing electricity. WAWAWAWOOHOO!!!

well it does bring back obscured childhood memories of putting my face up real close to the tv, where I could feel the and smell static In the dark, but I have no idea why the hell I purchased a 200ml bottle of it.

It's masculine and clean. It smells like cool mountain air and a sharpened blade

ce ne sent rien on se fout du monde

Odeur 53 just smells like pure abstract perfumeyness to me. A little bit floral. Very pale and pure, clean and sterile. It was probably unique back in 1998, but these days there are lots of scents in this tinny, minimalist, quarter-of-a-perfume style. Sure, it’s pleasant; just very vague and perfunctory.

Continuing the journey through Comme des Garçons, today I’m at Odeur 53. Made up of abstract notes like the freshness of oxygen, flaming rock, freshly mowed grass, wash drying in the wind, sand dunes, pure air of the high mountains, flash of metal, and nail polish, it already sounds interesting, so let’s go. On first spray, it opens green and slightly sharp, almost like aloe hand sanitizer. It feels clean, airy, and a little sterile. After about ten minutes, it settles into something softer and more intriguing. I get a dusty, grassy floral impression, but not a blooming flower. It smells more like the stem, slightly dry and vegetal. After about an hour, it shifts into a watery mineral saltiness. There is still some grassiness, but now it reminds me of clean linens left outside to dry that picked up the scent of dewy grass. Not mud, just fresh damp greenery. The whole thing stays very light and close to the skin, similar to Molecule 02 in that transparent your skin but better way. This definitely feels like a fragrance that will smell different on everyone. Some people will project it more, and some may barely notice it. It only comes in a 200ml bottle, which makes sense because of how light it is. I could see someone throwing this on anytime, even before bed, and easily going through multiple bottles. I think you will like this fragrance based on two things: Number one is whether you can attach a memory to it. I really believe this will show up differently on most people’s skin, and that static, grassy, almost doctors office cleanliness it has can trigger something from the past. It feels familiar in a strange way, like something you have smelled before but cannot fully place. Number two is if you genuinely enjoy your skin but better fragrances that are not loud. This is not going to fill a room. It sits close, stays subtle, and does its own quiet thing. If I’m being honest, a lot of what draws me in is the marketing. The abstract notes, the concept, the whole strange creative vibe, that is what really hooks you. The fragrance itself is interesting, but for me the story is just a little more exciting than the scent. Do I love it? Not really. Is it worth trying? Sure, why not.

Very very faint smelling and the notes are supposed to be "The Freshness of Oxygen, Flaming Rock, Freshly Mowed Grass, Wash Drying in the Wind, Sand Dunes, Pure Air of the High Mountains, Flash of Metal, Nail Polish." I'm mainly getting pure air of mountains and wash drying in wind. I don't get the crispness that some other "fresh" oxygen smelling fragrances have.