The earth is the original perfumer. Through wind and rain; through rivers and water; through trees and flowers, nature reveals her scents and secrets. Man just translates. If you are good, you create a scent that causes good vibrations; you create something sacred.
— Serge Lutens, talking to LiveMint about his upcoming fragrance, Santal Majuscule. Read more at Using scents to tell stories.
Serge Lutens’ first “anti-perfume”, 2010’s L’Eau Serge Lutens, was mildly controversial in the perfumed blogosphere. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t much mind either; as I said then, Mr. Lutens can do whatever he needs to do to keep himself interested — and/or to keep his brand afloat and attract new customers in new markets. Now we have the second in the L’Eau series, L’Eau Froide.
L’Eau Serge Lutens referenced clean shirts and cleanliness in general; L’Eau Froide, of course, is about cold water, and the brand’s website mentions “some fresh air in the rusty old water pipes”. That’s marginally more appealing to me than the clean shirts, but only marginally. As it turns out, I like L’Eau Froide much better than L’Eau Serge Lutens, but if you want the ending now — saves time, right? — I’ll add that while I enjoyed wearing it, it’s not going on my buy list.
L’Eau Froide opens on very cold lemony citrus…
When the topic of past lives comes up, what time period do you picture yourself inhabiting? For some reason, I always regress to a city in the Middle Ages. No other era or geographical location ever comes to mind. Perhaps I was an inn-keeper, goutishly solid and pink-cheeked and wary. If gender and physical talents are passed through the centuries, then I could have been a wet nurse. If they are not, then maybe I was a monastic scribe and illuminator. (My handwriting is awful.) It is strange to feel so connected to the sights and sounds of medieval Europe. I don’t actually believe in reincarnation. I think my visions come from the more recent past, from pop culture references about the dark ages like The Lion in Winter and The Name of the Rose. What the books and movies are notably short on, however, is odors.
Most of us think of this time period as smelling pretty ripe: burning garbage, sewage in the ditches and rivers, halitosis, mildew everywhere, the sick and dead of the Bubonic plague years, all those buckets of fermented urine that alchemists were supposed to be distilling into gold, etc. But years of reading foodie articles on panforte, mead and sweetmeats have perfumed my personal medieval fairy tales with honey and almond milk, dates and chestnuts and raw milk cheese, fruit jellies and poached pears with long pepper. Most particularly at this turn of the seasons, I start to dream of the scent of mulling spices. As the cold sets in, there is something instantly cheering and sustaining in the thought of hot mulled wine or cider. And for me, no simmering pot of either would be complete without a bay leaf…
Serge Lutens will launch the second fragrance in his L’Eau series (see last year’s L’Eau Serge Lutens), L’Eau Froide (cold water), in the spring of 2012…
I always tell people my favorite season is summer. In truth, it’s autumn. I whisper this fact, because while autumn is heartrendingly beautiful with its crisp mornings and warm afternoons and a garden still full of dahlias and greens, autumn is also the harbinger of winter. Each delightful, knife-sharp afternoon is a reminder of the rainy days ahead. Each walk through a shuffle of parchment-red leaves portends months of dark, slushy cold. When I can forget all that and focus on the here and now, I love fall.
For courage, I queued up Ian Bostridge’s sad but glorious Schubert lieder and chose ten autumn situations and matching fragrances to write about for today’s post:
Making the seasonal transition: All of the sudden, a morning feels colder than the rest. Instead of grabbing a cardigan, you ponder a light jacket. You’re almost ready to fire up the furnace for the first time this year, but not quite yet. A warmer fragrance seems fitting, but you’re not quite tempted to give yourself over to heavy gourmands and orientals. Ormonde Jayne Tolu works nicely now. Its green heart lightens its rich, oriental base. Annick Goutal Eau de Charlotte is a good transitional fragrance, too. It is fresh, but offers the after-school treat of bread, jam, and chocolate…