MATIERE PREMIERE Metal Lavender AI collage by Tamara

Few perfumery ingredients can boast the same combination of functional importance and cultural baggage as lavender. On the one hand, it is one of the building blocks of an entire fragrance family – fougères would be unthinkable without it, and no perfumer’s palette would be complete in its absence. Its icy freshness, soothing coniferous facets, gentle greenness, sparkling juiciness and crystalline clarity illuminate the warm foundations of fougères, creating the tension and contrast that define the genre. Thanks to its unrivaled crispness and delicate floral character, lavender even gave rise to an entire category of fragrances – eau de lavande – proving that a single note can easily perform as a complete olfactory composition.

 Lavender Courtesy of the brand

Ironically, lavender is both empowered and burdened by its popularity. Its cultural journey began as far back as Ancient Rome, where it took its name from the verb lavare, “to wash.” To this day, cleanliness remains the first association lavender evokes. Yet in the collective imagination, lavender occupies a far more utilitarian place than ingredients such as iris, whose reputation has long been shaped by notions of luxury, refinement and artistic sophistication.

When MATIERE PREMIERE kindly sent me a bottle of their new release, Metal Lavender, I showed it to my husband, as I do with any fragrance that might potentially appeal to a man. (After all, how else can evaluate the sillage?) He smelled the cap and immediately said, “Oh, this could work for me. Put it on my shelf.” Then he took a closer look at the bottle. The moment he read the word “Lavender,” he changed his mind. “No,” he said, “I don’t like lavender.”

Where did that certainty come from? Lavender sachets? Household air fresheners? Some half-forgotten association with scented laundry?

Which is precisely why MATIERE PREMIERE’s decision to place lavender front and centre in the title of their latest creation strikes me as such a bold and meaningful gesture.

MATIERE PREMIERE Metal Lavender Courtesy of the brand

Yet lavender’s story hardly ends with fougères and eaux de lavande. There was also a chapter called Trendiness, during which lavender enjoyed a second life within the feminine fragrance wardrobe. It was the era of sweet lavenders, when creative directors and perfumers discovered the dramatic contrast created by pairing lavender’s icy aromatic character with gourmand accords: aromatic austerity meeting edible comfort, coolness meeting warmth, ice meeting fire. Lavenders draped over warm chocolate and coffee bases like an unsweetened bluish mousse atop a rich cake appeared everywhere, both in niche and mainstream perfumery. Tom Ford Lavender Extreme, Eisenberg José Eisenberg, Bond No.9 New Haarlem, Covet by Sarah Jessica Parker and, of course, the immensely successful Mon Guerlain all belong to this chapter. But that chapter eventually came to an end. What comes next?

Apparently, this is the same question the team at MATIERE PREMIERE asked themselves, becoming pioneers in writing a new chapter in lavender’s story. What should we call it? Let us think about it.

Courtesy of the brand

If sweet lavenders solved the problem through the marriage of cold and warmth, medicinal freshness and sweetness, Metal Lavender proposes an entirely different path. It does not warm lavender. It does not make it gourmand. It does not attempt to make it comforting and cosy like freshly laundered sheets on a summer afternoon. Quite the opposite. The many facets through which lavender usually reveals itself in the hands of a talented perfumer – uplifting, juicy, ringing, blue-floral, clean, citrusy – seem deliberately smoothed away in Metal Lavender, leaving behind only its essence, its outline. There is no reference to lavender’s noble fougère heritage, nor any trace of its carefree gourmand phase. Like a ruthless and unsentimental sculptor, Aurélien Guichard chisels away everything non-essential from this marble block, leaving only one thing behind: the idea of lavender.

Aurelien Guichard Courtesy of the brand

He then lays this idea as a thin, crisp shell upon a textured base of contemporary musks and woods, pushing the composition as far as possible from the realm of aromatherapy, with which lavender oil remains so strongly associated (traditionally, lavender is believed to calm and invigorate at the same time). Guichard takes it to the opposite pole – the pole of abstraction, the realm of conceptual art, where the word Lavender printed on a bottle should not tempt us into making the same mistake as my husband and assuming that what awaits inside is simply lavender water. And yes, Metal Lavender still thrives on contrast. But this is not a contrast of flavours or temperatures. It is a contrast of textures.

 courtesy of the brand

The mirror-smooth surface of an icy lavender block rubs against the mineral roughness of sculpted musks and woody notes, creating an almost tactile sensation. In the wake of its sillage, one hears the delicate ringing of ice crystals. I suspect that this effect will prove magnetically attractive to those around you. Be prepared to answer questions about what you are wearing. Because you will smell like a mystery.

To my mind, MATIERE PREMIERE has brilliantly succeeded in giving one of perfumery’s most familiar and, least romanticized ingredients a distinctly contemporary voice. I do not know whether Metal Lavender represents the future of lavender. But the very fact that someone dared to ask the question deserves applause.

Note: Metal Lavender uses two lavenders: a lavandin with metallic facets, cultivated exclusively for MATIERE PREMIERE in its own Ecocert-certified fields, and Lavandin Oil Grasse, from Haute Provence, Cashmeran, musk

Disclosure: the fragrance was offered by the brand; opinions are always my own.

Tamara Gezerdava, Contributor

Please read Michelyn’s exclusive interview with Aurelien Guichard

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