The Getty Museum website states that “a kouros is a statue of a standing nude youth that did not represent any one individual youth but the idea of youth . . . The kouros embodies many of the ideals of the aristocratic culture of Archaic Greece . . . In a society that emphasized youth and male beauty, the artistic manifestation of this world view was the kouros.”
This seems an apt description of YSL Kouros — a fragrance that smells of warm skin, funky musk and sweet spices. There’s a bit of a tart blast at the opening bell, a kind of astringent clean that functions as a warmup for the earthier elements lurking in the wings, youth moving into funkified beauty.
Kouros is another one of those fragrances that launches a thousand hyperboles (see: Yatagan, Muscs Koublai Khan), with most of them being wide of the target and short of the mark. No, it doesn’t smell like urinal cake; it doesn’t smell like fecal matter; it doesn’t smell like a trucker’s sweaty underwear.
If it actually smelled like any of these, countless men and women wouldn’t be reviewing it and/or wearing it, and they do both — endlessly. Rather, Kouros smells decidedly rich, complex and multi-tiered: tangy and bracing at first, then giving way to dry woods, green mosses and earthy resins mixed with some medium-to-light florals for balance.
The sh**ty civet some reviewers swear upon their grandmother’s holy grave they smell isn’t real civet anymore (genuine civet musk has become prohibitively expensive due to pressure from animal rights groups and worldwide bans on the cat), but rather some synthetic approximation, so there aint no there there, you know what I mean? So let’s back away from our fecal-focused hysterias and just concentrate on how the synthetic mosses mix with the synthetic woods, synthetic musks and synthetic spices to create one of the more deeply redolent fragrances to come out of the 1980′s.
It still smells good today, too, unlike other 80′s blockbusters (Obsession, anyone?). I like YSL M7 better, but this comes in a very close second — and it’s much easier to find, since it hasn’t been, you know, discontinued.
Ignore the accountant driven sequels: Kouros Body, Kouros Tattoo and Kouros Fraicheur. Just stick with the original — it’s the best of the bunch.
Photo of the Kouros bottle below:
The almost nautical (in a lighthouse kind of way) bottle doesn’t really give much of a hint of the spicy, musky fragrance inside.
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