Thirty years ago next month I bought a 15ml bottle of Yohji parfum in Broadmead, in Bristol, and I still have it. I got through about half in the first three years, left the rest in a cupboard, and sealed it with parafilm in 2014, which may well have been locking the stable a long way too late. When I opened it earlier this year the liquid had darkened and the top of the perfume had gone. There’s a faint powdery impression of the heart and base, and nothing at all of whatever used to happen in the first few minutes on skin.

Losing that from the bottle was always going to happen, but it’s gone from my head as well. I remember buying it and unwrapping the tissue paper, I remember wearing it, and none of that comes with a smell. Ask me to call up the opening and I get nothing I’d trust. In April I wrote here about “galbanum landing sharp and metallic”, but “metallic” is also the word in Raiders of the Lost Scent’s retrospective, which I quoted one paragraph later, so I can’t swear that was memory at all. I may just have been reading.

That’s the state I was in when the sample of Noir Gabardine arrived. Laurent Mazzone Parfums released it in 2011, fifteen years after Yohji, and its name turns up wherever people mourn the original. One Fragrantica commenter calls it “reincarnated juice, under a different name”. The resemblance is genuine, as far as my nose can be trusted on it, though it didn’t show up when I put it on. For a while it was simply a perfume I didn’t know, and then, some time later on my skin, it was noticeably something I did. A Reddit user says it’s “known for being almost identical” and adds, “It’s missing the magic of the original for me, though.” I’d love to be in a position to argue.

The note lists would explain the delay, if note lists explain anything. Lower down the two perfumes nearly overlap: vanilla, musk, amber and sandalwood are in both Fragrantica’s pyramid for Noir Gabardine and Parfumo’s entry for the parfum, and Raiders describes Yohji’s coumarin as “a warm, tonka-like depth” where Noir Gabardine simply lists tonka. Higher up they part. Noir Gabardine opens on galbanum, bergamot and mandarin, and Parfumo gives Yohji those three plus blackcurrant, cardamom, green notes, peach and pineapple, so perhaps Yohji began greener and fruitier while Noir Gabardine goes straight for citrus. But Fragrantica gives Yohji only galbanum, bergamot and green notes on top, with blackberry and raspberry below, and neither berry is on Parfumo at all. That’s one perfume with two sets of paperwork. Earlier this month I said I’d be very pleased to find blackberry in the vial, as though the matter were settled.

The parfum itself has no witness at all. Parfumo shows five ratings and an invitation to “Write the first Review”, so I’m left with what people say about Yohji in general, which probably means the eau de toilette, and they can’t agree on that either. Raiders has galbanum that’s “cold, almost mineral”. Osmoz says it “opens on a forthright, reassuringly warm, amber note”, and I can’t get from one to the other. The Ayala Moriel blog says the opening “can be experienced as harsh”, with “more than a little acetone-like note”, and calls the clear box a “glass coffin”, which I could have done without. Victoria at Bois de Jasmin got a first impression “green and radiant”, and a Parfumo reviewer, in translation, could “especially remember the pineapple in the top note, which was pleasantly sweet-sour and primarily fruity.” I’ve read them all and none of them brings it back.

The research is kinder than the note lists. Herz and Engen’s 1996 review says long-term odour memory seems “unusually resistant to decay”. In Engen and Ross’s 1973 experiment, recognition was only 70% straight after smelling, and a year later it was only 5% lower. Calling a smell up on purpose is another matter. The same review says people rate their ability to “conjure an odor sensation” as poor, and a 2014 paper describes smell as the sense “with the fewest instances of volitional imagery”. So my blank may say very little about what’s stored. I know how much weight I’m putting on this. That one-year follow-up had fifteen people in it, 70% is a shaky start, and they were being asked about the smells they’d actually been given, not lookalikes. Against that, they’d only been shown those smells, and I wore this one for three years. I think that if the real opening reached me again I’d recognise it at once, not because I’d rebuilt it in my head but because some of it had survived.

Noir Gabardine’s opening rang no bell, which is harder to read than I’d like. If recognition really lasts, then either those first few minutes aren’t Yohji’s or whatever I held of Yohji’s has gone after all, and I can’t tell which from here. The later recognition isn’t clean either. I smelled what’s left in my bottle earlier this year, and what’s left is the heart and base, the same stretch where Noir Gabardine stirred something, and there’s too little now to set the two side by side. I may have matched a 2011 perfume to a 2026 residue rather than to 1996. The only qualified judge is the person who stood in Broadmead that November, who isn’t available. And every time I try the sample I’m learning it, so if some trace of the old opening does survive, I may be laying Noir Gabardine over the top of it.

An unopened bottle or miniature from the original run is the next step, and I’ve been somewhere like this before. In 2013, twenty years after binning my first bottle, I bought a replacement Pasha de Cartier from Florida, and it’s still in its sealed box, because it was never the smell I wanted from that one, only the afternoon. Yohji is the same problem turned inside out. I’ve got the actual bottle with the actual thirty years on it, and the smell is all I’d want from anybody else’s.

A sealed miniature won’t be 1996 either. Citrus goes early: limonene, the molecule behind what Premiere Peau’s chemistry explainer calls bergamot’s “electric sparkle”, oxidises into something closer to “turpentine left in a hot car”, and I’d expect a seal to slow that rather than stop it. A well-kept example could still hold more of the opening than mine does, and if several from different sellers opened alike, that would count for something, though they could agree simply because they’ve all aged the same way.

Every one of those bottles would have survived by accident. Jean Kerléo, who composed Yohji, co-founded the Osmothèque at Versailles, an archive built to keep perfumes that have left the world. I said in April that I didn’t know whether Yohji is in it, and I ought to find out, since that’s the one place the opening might have been kept on purpose.

Tomorrow is the first of November. For three years I put this perfume on without giving its first few minutes a thought, since they were only the way in, and there’d be more of them next time. Noir Gabardine has got me closer than I expected, from the middle onward, so the character of the thing hasn’t gone out of reach altogether. I’d dearly like the way in back.

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