Serge Lutens Fleurs d’oranger

This is almost a rerun since I had tried this one eons ago when I first got into Uncle Serge. Did you have the experience I did with Serge Lutens in the early aughts? The first Lutens I smelled were like nothing before: Muscs Kublai Kahn with it’s crazy level of musk, Tubereuse Criminelle with it’s opening of gasoline over the tuberose, or this one, created by Christopher Sheldrake in 2003 with notes of tuberose and civet supplanting the delicate orange blossom. Fleurs d’oranger isn’t as in-your-face as the latter two, although there is an initial heady blast that is very feminine and might convince men that this isn’t one for them. But, boys wait for it and it becomes more wearable. Well, I’m wearing it anyway.

True story: my boss at the time was (and I assume is) a very nice woman from Van Nuys who was loathe to spend a dime on herself and didn’t think she liked perfume. I received in a trade a beensy little bottle of Fracas, a scent that I personally would not wear since it’s a gob-smack of tuberose, and although unlike Joe Gilles in “Sunset Blvd” I am not averse, it’s not a note that I feel I can pull off. So I passed it on. She adored it. It connected to her inner Barbara Stanwyck in a way she never knew she needed. She would wear it to work, applying it in little pinpricks I think, since you would just get little puffs of it every once in a while. I loved that she was flying her inner freak flag in the face of her boss, who was a grade A a$$hole.

In any case, I passed on my sample of Fleurs d’oranger and she was in love. However she was about as likely to spend the then astronomical amount of $95 for something as frivolous as perfume as she was to buy a Lear jet or try out for “American Idol.” Since her grade A a$$hoke boss had put her on the list to be forced to take a buyout and she was getting married, one of the other managers expensed a bottle from Barneys so she could wear it at the ceremony after I told him how much she loved it.

She smelled fabulous.

Much later I was able to get revenge on the grade A a44hole boss after he also was forced out, but that is a story for another day. Let’s just say Karma is a bitch, especially when helped by a bitch like me..

Fleurs d’oranger is available on the net for as little as $95 (for older bottles I assume) or $150 for 50ML, at the usual suspects. I received my sample as a gift with purchase from Barney’s

Image: Barney’s