Someone asked in the comments to last week’s review of Chypre Rouge if I thought that the Serge Lutens fragrances were an acquired taste, and I answered yes, sort of. It isn’t that any special knowledge is required to appreciate them: if special knowledge was required, I’d be no more likely to appreciate them than anyone else. But they do not, by and large, try to appeal to a large audience. If all you are familiar with is the standard department store fare, Serge Lutens may challenge your idea of what a personal fragrance ought to smell like. They aren’t all “pretty” in the conventional sense, and a few of them qualify as downright odd.

If you are a serious fragrance fanatic, odd quickly becomes a good thing; after all, it sometimes seems like most everything else on the perfume market was dispensed from the same vat. But odd in itself obviously isn’t enough, and it certainly doesn’t account for the superstar cult status accorded to Serge Lutens — how many other perfume lines have their own fan sites? There is nothing else as guaranteed to cause a flurry of anticipation on the fragrance forums and blogs as the announcement that a new Serge Lutens fragrance is due for release.

It is hard to explain the allure of the line to someone who hasn’t smelled any of the fragrances, and for that matter, I don’t think it is easy to understand until you’ve tried quite a few…

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