Immortelle, intimu.fr
The roaring sun sears above a turquoise sea. The stillness of a blue horizon, of a horizontal sky, crashes in a foam against the stark redness of the ragged shore. The cliffs are red, the land yellow, the trees grow dry and their leaves with an emerald glow. The Estérel mountains rise tall and superb, the purple guardians of Provençal towns, a shelter for monks and saints and perfumed shrubs. Memories of childhood summers spent in the shade of their lofty summits evoke fragrances of crackling pine needles and sticky cistus leaves, a wide landscape of thyme and lavender bushes, dried myrtle leaves and dried juniper sprigs, a saxicolous spectacle of scents yet none proves more Provençal in my eyes, more inherently Mediterranean than that of Immortelle.
Immortelle, photo by Laura Morelli, 2015
Helichrysum, the Golden Sun, the Everlasting bloom – no child of Provence can ever forget the smell of what the Ancients used to call “the yellow stoechas”. A multi-faceted note, Immortelle is just like the womb that bore her to life – proud, stern, solar, untamable. Dense, herbaceous, spicy like curry, thick as honey, boozy like fine mead, warm, dry, fruity and brown, its fragrance allures, subdues and deceives. To work with it, one has first to know it well, to understand its ever-changing olfactory palette, its animalic accents jolting out of a cistus heart, swaying from cloying sweet to dirty sweat in the span of a minute, in the blink of an eye. Few perfumers can boast such knowledge or mastery – to tame yet let glow the sun that ever shines, the golden jewel of the Provençal hinterland. These three did.
Sables, annickgoutal.fr digitall effects @Michelyn
Annick Goutal Sables – The Mother of Drag (Isabelle Doyen/ 1985): What went through the minds of Annick Goutal and Isabelle Doyenwhen they decided to create what would become an undefeated success for decades, the jewel of its own category, a UFO that broke set boundaries and opened a new olfactory horizon? Sables -French for “sands”- was launched in 1985, the same year as Poison and although the 80’s were to perfumery what drag is to fashion – a glittery, saturated, fashion-forward, over-the-top homage to past icons- never had it tiptoed so close to the edge of raunchiness. While Sables and Poison share an “eleganza-extravaganza” element, this richness of materials, the sultriness undimmed and unleashed, they are radically different. Where Poison is a “pageant queen” dressed in sequins and cinched-waist sateen dresses, Sables is the “freak queen” living her bliss in her own, quirky universe, shying not away from weirdness but proudly boasting her singular beauty. Sables has texture and depth of character. It is all about hot sands and burnished immortelles, beaming ambers drowning in Cistus and dirty flowers alluring on the skin. The Immortelle suffers here a harsh treatment, thrown into the furnace to exude every drop of its precious oil. The result is alchemical – medicinal cloy of Provençal aromatics, salty burn of Curry powder, oriental elegance of Benzoin and Myrrh. It is all too much but it is all there. In more ways than one, Sables is a drag-mother. The first of a family of Immortelle fragrances, it was also the first to bring a salty-sweat element into a fragrance without it being an essay on sexuality or Orientalism but more importantly, as overtly, femininely empowering as Sables can be, it was meant for a man. Annick Goutal’s husband. Notes – Immortelle, Cinnamon, Pepper, Sandalwood, Amber
L’Innommable, sergelutens.com
Serge Lutens L’Innommable – “Blood of my Blood” (Christopher Sheldrake/2018): One needn’t speak of the enduring love Serge Lutens bears towards the venomous density of immortelle flowers, for the champion of tenebrous balms and spices enshrined it in three different perfumes. L’Innommable, coming after El Attarine and Bourreau des Fleurs, is the latest iteration of a theme Christopher Sheldrake knows well yet managed to always reinvent. Where El Attarine melts the gold of Immortelle and welds it to a harsh and biting stick of Cumin seeds; Bourreau des Fleurs dries out the shrub and crushes it in a suffocating pot-pourri, and L’Innommable extracts its quintessential fruitiness and candies it in a benzoin slab. It is a purple dream, a glowing ruby set in a crystal reliquary throning in a hall of porphyry. Its holiness seeps like myrrhon from the golden aureoles of a miraculous icon, like the liquefied drop of San Gennaro’s blood – thrice holy in the sense of the Hebrew G-d, the One whose Name is unutterable, whose glorious Shekinah none can behold. Dense, furred, deep layers of burgundy, red, of scarlet and crimson from which a smoke with Incense rich billows and spires out over a background of shadows and Jasmine blossoms. Reasonably sweet, teetering on the edge of cloy without ever falling into a gourmand trap, L’Innommable is at once entirely Lutensian and immortal, hissing out a Luciferian sensuality with every puff of vanillin-overdosed Benzoin; terrible and enticing like a mouth to mouth with both a demon and an angel. A talisman dyed with purple ink where the profane meets the divine. Notes – Cumin, Immortelle, Benzoin, Frankincense
Marc-Antoine Barrois Ganymede (Digital collage/effects by Despina Veneti)©
Ganymède, Maison Marc-Antoine Barrois – A Son of Ice and Fire (Quentin Bisch/2019): When he released his first perfume, B683, Marc-Antoine Barrois, with perfumer Quentin Bisch, surreptitiously took the blatant, blaring and overcrowded niche bubble by surprise, proving without fanfare that a work of art is as good as its first intention. Luckily, Marc-Antoine Barrois is only driven by a love of a deed well-done, a passion for perfection in its every detail – the qualities one would expect in a tailor after all. His sartorial elegance is soft-spoken, the unloud expression of a quiet genius shrouded in humble silence, a mastery showing through layers, shades, textures and weave thus creating an impression of nonchalant harmony. Where B683 had the solemn strass and might of Zarathustra’s opening bars, Ganymède has the icy beauty of Satie’s Gymnopédies, blowing hot and cold, endlessly swaying from the aquatic tunes of Osmanthus to the solar bliss of Immortelle. It is a selenite ode, a dare as brazen as watching the Sun with an open eye, a deep plunge from the sticky heights of immortelle to its mercurial saltiness. A hushed lullaby opening with a tinkling Mandarin motif, dried to the dregs and pushed to an edge of zing by an argent strike of Akigala Wood, it chimes as loud as a murmur. The melancholy sifts through the dry aromatic crackle of the provençale flower which fire grows as swift as it runs out under a whiff of Black Pepper. Precise, monolithic yet somehow incredibly transparent and luminous, such is the essence of Marc-Antoine Barrois’ take on perfume and couture, a sartorial Soulages bringing light through darkness and air through heft, a conjurer’s trick deftly transcribed by Quentin Bisch into Ganymède. In this, it is perhaps truer to Marc-Antoine Barrois’ soul than B683. Notes: Italian Mandarin, Saffron; Violet, Chinese Osmanthus Absolute; Akigalawood, Immortelle Absolute.
Disclaimer: my own collection, opinions my own
– Alexandre Helwani, Contributor and author of The Perfume Chronicles
Marc-Antoine Barrois Ganymede by Despina Veneti©
Thanks to the generosity of Marc-Antoine Barrois, we have a draw for a 100ml bottle of Ganymede (value: $195/165€) and Ann from Indigo Perfumery for one registered reader in either the EU or USA. You must register here or your comment will not count. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what you enjoyed most about Alexandre’s choices of his favorite immortelle fragrances, if you have smelled Marc-Antoine Barrois Ganymede and where you live. Draw closes August 5. 2020
You can buy or sample Ganymede from Indigo Perfumery here
Worldwide stockists for Marc-Antoine Parfums here
Follow us on Instagram: @cafleurebon @theperfumechronicles @marcantoinebarroisparis @quentinbischperfumeur @indigoperfumery @sergelutens @goutalparis
Editor’s Note: Marc-Antoine Barrois Ganymede is a 2020 Art and Olfaction Finalist (best of luck)
This is our Privacy and Draw Rules Policy
We announce the winners only on our site and on our Facebook page, so like Çafleurebon and use our site feed… or your dream prize will be just spilled perfume.