El Attarine will be the next perfume to join the exclusive (i.e., Paris-only) collection from Serge Lutens, following last year's Sarrasins.
The El Attarine description:
Solaire.
Traduit tout ce qui est odoriférant.
La route des parfums par un solitaire.
And a longer explanation, written by Serge Lutens, from the press release…
I am walking behind Serge Lutens, the creative director of Christian Dior in the 1960s and 1970s, and perfumer to Shiseido since the 1980s, as he shows me around his garden in Marrakech. Immaculately clad, despite the 30°C Moroccan heat, in a tailored black suit, Lutens, 66, occasionally darts off the path into the dappled greenery, emerging minutes later with a flower or seeds for me to smell. 'This garden has a personality that doesn't want to expose itself,' he says in his thoughtful, poetic manner. 'Except for the palm trees, everything else grows in the shade. The garden and I are similar. I wouldn't like to be too public and this is not a public garden. Every time I walk around here I discover something I don't know, because the garden grows itself.'
— From Grow your own perfume in the Telegraph, in which columnist Liz Hancock looks at gardens grown by Serge Lutens, George Dodd of Scent Systems, Edmond Roudnitksa and Michel Roudnitska.
For the last couple years, the term “sleeper” has made me think of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Val Kilmer and Michelle Monaghan and written as well as directed by Shane Black of Lethal Weapon fame, this satire of film noir came out in the autumn of 2005, just as my perfume obsession was really starting to hog most of my leisure time. I remember thinking that I should go see the movie — it was getting great reviews and I’m one of those masochists who tries to support Downey Jr. when he isn’t incarcerated — but I probably spent the ticket money on a bottle of Bvlgari something. In any case, I didn’t make it to the theatre and I was not alone: the movie site Rotten Tomatoes reports that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang made a woeful total of $4.2 million on the big screen.
When it was released to DVD in June of the following year, I shelled out for the rental. It’s not a profound or ambitious movie, so I was almost embarrassed by how entertaining I found it…
So. I have a series of little plastic drawer thingies (you can see a picture here if you scroll down) where I store fragrance samples that are waiting to be tried. Once I take a sample out of its drawer, it hangs around on my desk until I’ve given it a few tries. Then I have a large plastic cart with drawers (you can see a picture here) that holds fragrance samples I’ve already tried but want to keep. Every so often I try something a few times and still can’t make up my mind about it either way. I don’t give up easy; some of my very favorite perfumes were not love at first sight. So those samples go into what I think of as “the purgatory basket”, and there they languish, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, yes, sometimes for years.
Recently the purgatory basket started to overflow. I thought about getting a bigger basket — that tells you most of what you need to know about my organizational style — but decided last week to make a concerted effort to clear an inch or so off the top. Most of the samples ended up in the “give away” box, a few got stored away in the “to keep” drawers, but a few sternly resisted categorization for the umpteenth time…
Sarrasins was the latest fragrance to join the exclusive (i.e., not exported) collection at Serge Lutens. It launched last year, and was described as a velvety floral, built around “a stunningly beautiful jasmine, gloved in jet-black ink”. The notes include jasmine, carnation, woods, musk and coumarin.
I read quite a few reviews of Sarrasins* before I smelled it, but as sometimes happens, I had already developed an idea of the scent in my head shortly after seeing the bottle and reading the ad copy (the “gloved in jet-black ink” and also “a sumptuous jasmin which smoothes its fur… A sigh of time”). So despite all evidence to the contrary, I was expecting — and looking forward to — a big huge skanky jasmine, dark and possibly rather scary…