Yves Saint Laurent
Yves Saint Laurent
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A unique visual signature based on accords, character, and seasonality
Coriander and artemisia slam together with bergamot's citric brightness, creating an aggressively herbal-soapy blast that's been compared to everything from vintage Dettol to expensive honey. Clary sage adds a lavender-adjacent sharpness that feels both barbershop-traditional and oddly confrontational. Within minutes, the civet begins its slow crawl upward, adding a urinal-mint sweetness that shouldn't work but absolutely does.
The spice cabinet opens fully as cinnamon and carnation create a hot, almost peppery warmth that wraps around jasmine's creamy indoles. Orris root introduces a violet-lipstick powder that collides beautifully with patchouli's earthy darkness, whilst the animalic base notes grow increasingly prominent. The leather accord emerges fully now, tarry and slightly burnt, mingling with musk in a way that reads as raw masculinity bottled.
What remains is animalic musk, oakmoss, and amber in a warm, dirty-skin intimacy that clings tenaciously. The vetiver provides a subtle smokiness whilst tonka bean adds just enough sweetness to prevent complete savagery. This final stage sits close but projects in heated moments, a musky-powdery-animalic signature that's unmistakably Kouros, simultaneously repellent and magnetic.
Kouros is the fragrance equivalent of a classical sculpture left out in the rain—magnificent, uncompromising, and slightly feral. Pierre Bourdon crafted an animalic monument here, where civet and musk don't whisper but roar beneath a canopy of artemisia's bitter green and coriander's soapy-spice bite. The opening feels aggressively clean yet deeply unsettling, like sniffing vintage shaving cream in a stable. As it develops, the carnation-cinnamon pairing adds a hot, clove-like spiciness that mingles with jasmine's indolic sweetness, whilst orris root provides a peculiar lipstick-powder refinement that somehow coheres with the barnyard funk below.
The leather accord isn't the gentlemanly Chesterfield variety—it's unwashed, animalic, closer to the inside of a well-worn saddle than a briefcase. Oakmoss and vetiver provide a mossy, earthy foundation that grounds the composition's wilder impulses, though Kouros never truly behaves itself. The synthetic musk compounds create an aura that precedes and follows the wearer, impossible to ignore and designed to provoke reaction rather than polite compliments.
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3.9/5 (7.2k)