Etat Libre d’Orange Uruk Chronicles AI collage by Nicoleta 

Every new État Libre d’Orange release comes with a familiar little ritual: I open the press release to meet the next arrival in my family of bottles, and before I have reached its end, I am mentally rearranging my reading list, rewatching a film, or replaying a song I physically need to hear again. That is part of what makes , one of the original troublemakers of modern niche perfumery, so fabulous to me: the way literature, cinema, music, and scent keep spilling into one another, with the references planted by the house becoming tangled up in my own associations, until I can barely remember who invited whom into the never-ending conversation.

Over the past twenty years, État Libre D’Orange perfumes have bookmarked entire passages from my own life that revisiting them all would require a rather generous extension of my word count for this article. But! I can’t go on without mentioning a few whose threads I could no longer pull free without unravelling the memories themselves: the naughty Putain des Palaces, forever entangled with my memories of my visit to Paris; the witchy Afternoon of a Faun, my faithful sidekick through countless autumn walks; and You or Someone Like You, with whom I have negotiated seven-ish summers of increasingly unreasonable heat. Then there is Rien, with the bass from Berlin’s underground clubs still pulsing somewhere in the background, and Frustration, which opened a different set of doors, leading me through Twin Peaks, Julee Cruise, and my childhood fascination with Audrey Horne working behind a perfume counter, all the way back to my favourite brown leather jacket and the smell of roasted chestnuts in October. Perhaps the strongest association of all takes me back to September 2021, a month that will forever belong to The Ghost in the Shell, whose arrival brought back Dan Simmons’s Hyperion and Shirow Masamune’s visual universe into such delicious proximity that my sci-fi-loving brain was already halfway across the galaxy before I had even first touched the blotter.

Etat Libre d’Orange collection image via the brand’s social media

By the time a new bottle reaches me, there is usually quite a welcoming committee already gathered inside my head, cheering at the door. Having spent the summer on something of an Odysseus kick (yes, loved Nolan’s film), rereading The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid (as Nolan intended!), and retelling their stories to my kid, I was already in the right frame of mind when Uruk Chronicles arrived, inviting me to travel further back still, to the world’s oldest surviving epic, Gilgamesh.

Uruk was a real city in ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now southern Iraq, and Gilgamesh its legendary king, the hero of what is widely regarded as the world’s oldest surviving epic. Gilgamesh begins as a powerful, arrogant ruler whose treatment of his people prompts the gods to create someone capable of challenging him: Enkidu, a wild man raised outside civilization, who becomes first his opponent and then his closest companion. Together, they venture into the Cedar Forest, kill its guardian, Humbaba, and later defeat the Bull of Heaven, sent against Gilgamesh by the goddess Ishtar. There are monsters, divine quarrels, and enough heroic excess to fill a high budget blockbuster, but the story changes profoundly when the gods condemn Enkidu to die. His death leaves Gilgamesh devastated, confronting both the loss of someone he loves and the terrifying realization that his own strength offers no protection against the same fate. His search for everlasting life takes him beyond the familiar world, across the Waters of Death, and Gilgamesh eventually retrieves a plant said to restore youth, only to lose it to a snake, and returns to Uruk without the escape from mortality he had hoped to find, closing the circle.

Beneath the gods and monsters, now wearing different skins, the human impulse to bargain with the inevitable, to find some loophole that might keep the people we love, and ourselves, here a little longer, remains as familiar as ever. There is something wonderful about revisiting a story that has been told and retold for thousands of years, passing from voice to clay, from language to language, and finding that it still has another way of reaching us, this time through scent.

Etat Libre d’Orange Uruk Chronicles, via the brand 

État Libre d’Orange Uruk Chronicles opens with the irreverent appetite of a young king, strawberry and tangerine spilling into a bright, juicy excess that seems entirely untroubled by the possibility of consequences. There is something so insolently cheerful about this opening, all ripe fruit and sticky fingers, with the sharpness of citrus keeping the sweetness on its toes. Ebelia™, Givaudan’s proprietary citrus-fruity molecule, brings its own fizzy, tropical energy to the feast, making the fruit feel kinetic and alive, turning both the saturation and the volume all the way up. I can quite happily place the young Gilgamesh here, before grief interrupts the party, with his enormous appetite for life and the careless confidence that everything laid before him is his for the taking. For now, immortality can wait; with the arrogance of a young demigod and the certainty that he will never run out of time, for there is never ending juice to squeeze out of life, and enjoy. The Spanish word disfrutar keept echoing in my mind as I sniff my wrists in the first few minutes after spraying, its meaning of enjoyment still carrying an echo of its etymological roots in gathering fruit, in taking pleasure in what life yields, and here the connection feels so deliciously literal.

Etat Libre d’Orange Uruk Chronicles – AI mood image by Nicoleta  

As the opening’s exuberance settles, I can imagine the feast being packed away for the journey, with Pomarose keeping the fruit within reach a little longer, the Givaudan molecule bringing together rosy facets, baked apple, and the concentrated sweetness of dried plums and raisins (all approved by my inner hobbit as proper meal planning for the road). I also like the idea of fruit ripening, drying, and concentrating its sugars as a metaphor for growing older, perhaps a little wiser, with sweetness becoming more complex as time takes its share. In my head, we are already outside the gates of Uruk, with dust settling on clothes, heading towards the Cedar Forest.

Then the shadows begin to gather, drawing closer, and the saffron accord brings a dry, leathery warmth, while iris releases a fine veil of powder, like dust shaken from a curtain as it opens for the second act. In État Libre D’Orange’s retelling, saffron belongs to the flower of immortality waiting at the bottom of the ocean, and my imagination lingers on those precious, impossible petals, almost within reach, while the iris lends the scene its own sense of time passing, of brightness slowly becoming a memory. Cypriol pulls the composition towards darker ground and humid roots, with its smoky, earthy woodiness brushing against leather and a shadowy, balsamic richness. Cedar lends the woods a dry, tactile grain, while tonka folds a warm sweetness around their edges, with a fragility that makes me think of paper curling in the heat, its blackened edges crumbling inward while the words are still just legible. I picture worn leather, dust caught in the folds of clothes, the accumulated smells of a long journey, with a little of that fruit still tucked into the traveler’s pockets, sweeter now, bruised from the road.

Jordi Fernández and Etat Libre d’Orange Uruk Chronicles – AI collage by Nicoleta

Jordi Fernández gives this ancient quest a wonderfully modern skin, moving from the almost insolent pleasure of juicy fruits into an oudy, ambery warmth. I love that Uruk Chronicles is filled with textured contrasts, leaving room for both the appetite and the ache, for a tale as old as time.

It is easy to find ourselves in Gilgamesh and his quest for immortality, in that persistent urge to squeeze a little more out of life, especially now, when the world seems to be moving faster than we can make sense of it, and questions about what makes us human, and what might remain of us, feel so insistently present at every step. In the greater scheme of things, perhaps we are still asking for much the same things: a little longer with the people we love, enough time to become whoever we dreamed we might be, and the hope that something of us will remain, even after we have crossed that final threshold.

Editor’s note: Can’t finish the article without mentioning that the bottle is absolutely gorgeous and beautifully in tune with the concept, its deep green, somewhere between forest shade and polished mineral, providing a particularly striking setting for the label’s intricate design, inspired by Sumerian-Akkadian cuneiform tablets and Mesopotamian frescoes. Uruk Chronicles launched in 2025 as a Harrod’s exclusive and is now available  at all stockists.

Top Notes: Strawberry, Ebelia, Tangerine; Heart Notes: Accord Saffron, Iris, Pomarose; Base Notes: Tonka, Cypriol, Cedarwood

Nicoleta Tomsa, Senior Editor

Also, check out my reviews of Ghost in the Shell,  Rien and Frustration

Above The Waves is a top 2025 Best of Scent for Michelyn

Please read all about Etienne de Swardt, founder and Creative Director here

Disclosure: Perfume kindly gifted by the brand, as always, opinions are my own.

Etat Libre d’Orange Uruk Chronicles courtesy of the brand

Thanks to the generosity of Etat Libre d’Orange we have a 100 ml bottle for one registered reader from the EU or US. You must register or your entry will not count. To be eligible, please leave a comment saying what sparks your interest based on Nicoleta’s review, your favorite Etat Libre D’Orange perfume and where you live. Draw closes 9/30/2026

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