Bandit Versus Cabochard: A Catfight In The Green
Please welcome my other contributing writer all the way from Sweden, Tove Solander! She will cover the much neglected Smell-alikes section of Aromascope.
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I’m taking up on Ina’s great idea of spotting “Smell-alikes”, and for my first post the smell-alikes chosen are Robert Piguet’s Bandit and Cabochard by Grès. It’s no wonder they’re scent siblings. Here are the notes I’ve found for each, with common notes in bold:
Bandit: bergamot, gardenia, aldehyde, jasmine, clove, rose, iris, musk, castoreum, patchouli, vetiver, ambergris, leather, woody notes.
Cabochard: bergamot, mandarin, galbanum, ylang ylang, jasmine, rose, clove, oakmoss, tobacco, musk, iris, sandalwood, vetiver, leather, castoreum, patchouli, labdanum.
Reviewers on Basenotes seem to agree that Cabochard is like a lighter and more wearable Bandit. For me, it’s more like the other way around. This may be because I have the “real deal”, i.e. the vintage version, of Cabochard (at least I think my sample is vintage), while Bandit is the contemporary eau de parfum, which is supposed to be softer and more floral (with the pure parfum being the softest and prettiest) than the sharper and harsher eau de toilette (which I’d love to try).
I remember when I first smelled Bandit eau de parfum, I thought it was unbearably sour and sharp and musty and herbal, a real old-fashioned scent. When I revisited it this year I fell in love, wrote a rave review in my blog, and changed my Basenotes rating from one star to five! In the company of Cabochard, Bandit is the feminine and pretty one, yet I don’t find Cabochard unwearable or old-fashioned at all, that’s how much my taste has changed – or developed, if you like. They are definitely sisters: dry, green, bad girl scents with leather undertones and light floral overtones. Bandit is softer and more powdery, while Cabochard is sharper and drier. They share a sort of juicy sourness, without being citrusy, but the sourness of Cabochard is more pungent, more like fresh-cut grass, while Bandit is almost sweet-and-sour. Speaking in colours, I envision Bandit as a bright yet creamy light green/yellow, and Cabochard as more of an acid green/yellow with specks of brown.
Bandit smells like it could give you hay fever, but don’t envision old, yellow hay, envision still green straw. Straw and pollen in the air and perhaps a hint of florals but very green florals, like dandelions. After about half an hour it develops this amazing warmness, like warm skin. I’m guessing this is the leather. It does not smell like a horse or a cow, but it feels like one, the body heat radiating from a large animal, indicating its presence. Or, if you’d like to get down and dirty: a tumble in the hay – or in the meadow - the sweetish smell of sunburnt skin and fresh sweat mingling with crushed stems.
When I first smelled my Cabochard sample I thought it was a dead ringer for Bandit, only denser and more hardcore, but smelling them side by side I discern some differences. Cabochard is the greenness of Bandit without the hay fever and animals, it’s a field or a forest (deciduous) rather than a farm. In the opening I get the vintage-style bitterness of oakmoss, but not very strongly, not a monster chypre (then again, considering my first reaction to Bandit, it might just be that my bittersweet meter has gone bananas, perfumista style). It’s cooler than Bandit, the level of coolness you could expect from a green scent. It’s also drier, the way lichen is dry, or wood, that’s where the brown hues come into the picture. It does have some amount of soft, powdery sweetness though, especially in the drydown, it’s nowhere near, say, a hardcore masculine vetiver in bitter greenness.
I conducted this experiment by putting one scent on each wrist, then swapping wrists and doing it all over again. One thing this taught me is that I prefer the scent I smell first, and/or the scent on my left wrist. When I smelled Bandit first I found Cabochard too sharp and thin, and when I smelled Cabochard first I found Bandit overly sweet, almost like dandelion-flavoured candy, if that’s fathomable. Whichever I smelled first had the perfect “Bandit scent” as it is in my mind. In the end, however, Bandit is the winner because of the wonderful animal warmth it radiates, while Cabochard is a little flatter and fades faster. Now I only wonder what outcome this experiment would have had if I had compared Bandit eau de toilette or vintage Bandit to the reformulated Cabochard?
21 comments March 13th, 2007