Review: CK One

still a beautiful scent

The 1990s perfume CK One is a masterpiece. Even calling it that, though, is a bit of a joke. It’s like calling a nice toaster a masterpiece. Yes, you might say: it makes very nice toast. It cooks the bread a second time. But, a masterpiece? A masterpiece is something intricate composed by a mentally ill person, which we hang on the wall of a wealthy person, to remind us that suffering can have interesting externalities. 

It is still a lovely scent. It’s cheap and wearable in all seasons. It’s hard to say what it smells like. It is warm-cool, dim-bright. It evokes promise, but of what we’re not sure, like a half-finished neon sign. Yes, it is certainly citrus, but the citrus’ piquancy and bitterness are hidden under a quietly lush tropical sweetness, some notion of papaya cutely peeking in through the curtains. There are no jagged edges, or, even, edges: everything blends into this familiarly artificial chord we all know now. Yes: you probably know what CK One smells like, even if you couldn’t place it. Like the smell of gasoline, the smell of CK One is an element of the modern ecosystem, a feature of post-industrial wilderness, a texture we know better than the texture of feathers or ocean waves. 

And yet this is all missing the point, in a way. The very point of CK One is that it is not meant to be thought about. When you talk about “some notion of papaya,” the spirit of CK One reaches through time to tell you that you are lame. Chill the fuck out. Like any masterpiece of minimal design, it is meant to be inevitable. It is like a Mies skyscraper: it might not thrill you, but it’s hard to criticize. Nothing can be taken away, nothing can be added. The bottle itself, an utterly perfect design, is unimpeachably boring, excitingly bland.

As with everyone roughly my age, CK One is a nostalgic smell for me.

When I grew up, I had a sense of Us and Them. Nobody had to tell me of this division. I didn’t think of it, in the same way that you don’t think of gravity. It was just there, the two tribes. 

Like: sure, there were the jocks, the nerds, the ethnic enclaves, the band kids. But underlying all of this, there was a fundamental distinction. Over there, were the basically well-formed children, who were pliable material that the teachers could make sense of, who understood the social engagements. And then there were the others, who never had a sense of naturalness. We dressed in hand-me-downs, we picked our noses. We could never just stand there looking normal or execute unmarked human behavior. In lieu of the affirmation that others were offered for executing the gestures that came to them so easily, we maybe reached for mastery in some non-social domain we could grasp: video games, cumbersome string instruments, watercolor. 

We couldn’t even band together, because we didn’t want to be seen with each other. I remember Matthew, another malformed child. What was his crime? I think it was his warbly voice, his fondness for turquoise. He was always a little accelerated, a little at the wrong tempo. He had too much joy and laughter. If I stood next to him, it would be clear that I was more like him than the anointed ones, who would go through a beautiful childhood, towards a beautiful life, with the comfortable capability for flock behavior that promised smooth integration with the institutions of modern life.

And the smell of Them was CK One. That was the pheromone of functional people. Or it was, at least, when I was just starting to achieve sentience, when I began to understand my place. By the time I got to high school, the smells were much worse, Axe Body Spray being the canonical worst offender, a fresh icepick driven into your prefrontal cortex through the nostril every time you walked down the hall. Fruity shampoo was also a big one, being thrown in large quantities from packs of girls with thick straight hair like show ponies. However, CK One was my first scent memory of what Over There smelled like, which must have wafted from those who seemed like they knew what they were doing.

I tried to be Over There, in fits and starts, sometimes. But I didn’t even know where to begin. My learning machine for human behavior was completely broken. And I learned, quickly, that the only thing worse than not being cool, was trying to be cool, while not being cool. Anything I did to attempt popularity—a change of wardrobe, a new mannerism—was mocked relentlessly, or at least called out as the artificial thing it was. If I had worn something like, say, CK One, I would’ve instantly been marked as an impostor. I was supposed to smell bad, or at least, to smell like nothing. 

I was terrified all the time. I imagined that others were not. But imagining that you are alone in suffering is a mark of arrogance, the arrogance of the lonely. Maybe they were terrified too. Maybe those who wore CK One in the height of its fashion had managed to grab hold of a tiny slice of popularity, for a moment, but lived in constant dread of stepping out of line. Or maybe they weren’t terrified at the time, but they were soon. They found, graduating adolescence, that the vagary of adult world couldn’t be so easily navigated. The basic strategy that had been so faultlessly useful, “go along to get along,” would now result in a dead-end job, a shitty apartment, relationships decaying for hard-to-pin-down reasons. If one is a skinny extra in a Calvin Klein ad, one can simply look nonchalant, or make out with another skinny extra. However, broadly, as a human being, the options are more perilous and numerous.

In the end, CK One is a perfume of optimism and reassurance. It’s bland reassurance, which makes it all the more pleasant. It says: wearing this, you belong. Belonging will require no sacrifices. You don’t have to commit to the pain of an identity or watch as that identity is destroyed by passing time. The sunshine will never burn you. You can ask me for a hug, it’s not weird. If you go home in the cold, you won’t even feel alone.