My particular type of crazy is that not only do I buy fragrances for a fantasy self that lives in a parallel universe but also in honour of a past self that actually existed, in some sort of weird attempt to capture, if not my youth, then a positive memory of who I was – always slightly improved, of course – in that timeline. A case in point is 10 Corso Como by 10 Corso Como, which I bought to remind myself of the thinner and more confident Claire who lived in a city near Milan between 1997-1998 and was always hanging around the 10 Corso Como store and fashion outlets at the weekends.
I didn’t have much back then, but man did I have swagger. Apart from the Armani suit I picked up for 80,000 Lira (€80 in today’s money) and was slim enough to fit into exactly twice, the purchase I was most proud of was a squat glass frog I bought on sale from 10 Corso Como because it had a chip in the base. I suppose that, technically, it was a paperweight, but with no papers in my bare little room in a Bergamo garret (I may be exaggerating a little), it functioned purely as an objet d’art that elevated my existence by winking at me from my pile of books that also functioned as my bedside table.
Jesus, sorry, this review is beginning to sound like those stories on recipe blogs you’re forced to wade through to get to the recipe you Googled just to get the cooking time on a bone-in pork shoulder.
Anyway. 10 Corso Como smells like the 1990s to me, a sleek mishmash of wood, spices, vetiver, rose, and incense that smells like what you’d imagine a Calvin Klein model, a glossy magazine, or a concept hotel smelling like – minimalist, sort of clean-spicy, sweetish, and lots of air and space between the molecules.
I get a lot of that pickled lumbar that passed for sandalwood back then, making me think of a proto-Santal 33, a peppery-fizzy incense that feels less liturgical than it does sherbetty, and enough grassy sourness from the vetiver to hint at the exotic wood they were just beginning to market as ‘oud’. It smells grey and chic, like a finely cut bolt of mulberry silk. There is some relation to Black Cashmere, Wenge, Chaos and its ilk by Donna Karan, as well as to the pale, watery spiced rose of both Marni and Costes. Years later, Black by Puredistance would pick up pretty much the same thread.
In other words, pleasant but not unique, and certainly nothing so groundbreaking that I’d miss were it to go. I’m probably stuck with it, though, because my bottle came with a faulty sprayer, which means that applying it has become like accompanying an elderly male relative to the restroom and never knowing when the dribble will become a spurt.
Cover Image: Photo by Anastasia Eremina on Unsplash