L’Artisan Parfumeur, like Serge Lutens, is a Paris-based niche fragrance house, and I would guess that if you were to rank niche perfume brands by the status accorded to them at the various online fragrance blogs and forums, Serge Lutens would easily take the top spot and L’Artisan would comfortably take the second (do comment if you think my estimation is way off base).

The two brands make an interesting study in contrasts, especially if you will allow for any number of sweeping generalizations (and if you won’t, do please skip the rest of this post). Yesterday in my review of Sa Majesté la Rose, I said that the Serge Lutens fragrances can be characterized as…

…personal artistic statements; to smell them is akin to entering someone else’s dream world. At the same time, as perfumes, they are satisfyingly rich and complex…

As with the classic perfumes of the first half of the 20th century, the Serge Lutens scents unfold slowly over the course of hours, and it is this complexity, I think, that allows for the intense, dream-like quality of the line…

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