Hey friends – this is March, we moved things around this week. Quick write-up today. I got my decant of Serge Lutens El Attarine and I … am still deciding how I feel about it, but I can’t say I’m pining for a bottle. That’s likely all the write-up you’re going to get, which is probably for the best since it’s unobtanium at this point.
However. I also bought a small decant of Lutens’ L’Innommable* in their skyscraper bottle. Here’s some AI slop scraped from various sites (you’re welcome!)
“Launched in 2018 and created by perfumer Christopher Sheldrake, it is a bold, complex niche scent described by the brand as a combination of every Serge Lutens paradox. Accords: Amber, balsamic, fresh spicy. Notes: Siamese benzoin, cumin (caraway seed), frankincense, and dried stone fruits with nuances of vanilla and sandalwood … it opens with a spicy, slightly fruity warmth featuring dried stone fruits and cumin, then transitions into a deep, smoky, and balsamic amber drydown anchored by benzoin and frankincense.”
Sounds worth a sniff, right? Well, surprise, it is fabulous. I get dates, coffee, cumin, leather… it reminds me a bit of the old school classic, L’Artisan Navigateur, with the rum and coffee and spices, and lasts a good 24 hours on my skin. So, I should also note that it’s got pretty meh online reviews and Fragrantica stars, so clearly I’m an outlier and YMMV. I’m now contemplating a bottle, they aren’t cheap but they aren’t hard to find either (sidenote—you know how the original tall bottles fall over? These look even more precarious).
Have you tried this? Any of the other gratte-ciel scents? (“sky-scraper,” and apparently inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.) I think some were existing scents, a couple new ones, and the line’s already been discontinued, if I’m understanding correctly.
*I’Innommable translates variously to unnameable, indescribable, or possibly unspeakable in the “too ghastly to mention” way – choose your own adventure, I guess.
cover image via Pexels, I tried to find one that felt a little like Lang’s Metropolis
This is interesting too!
Oh For the Days: Serge Lutens L’Haleine des Dieux
Paris Springtime 2018
Stealing Again: Clue Perfumery With The Candlestick, The Point, and Tom Ford Lost Cherry
She Went to Paris!
The Serge Lutens scents that I own and love are the ones that are out of character from his normal wheelhouse, so I don’t think this one will be my cup of tea. Those skyscraper bottles seem like risky business as well. What marketing focus group thought those were a good idea? Thanks for the review March!
You are welcome, and this may be an area in which we are NOT scent twins!
Dates, coffee and cumin sound like my worst nightmare… I think.
Uncle Serge himself??.… sigh. He’s probably dancing around in his garden ( Morocco? Somewhere exotic) and not even thinking about What I Want, which is a sane price and size for Daim Blonde. Eric ran through a laundry list of missteps by Shiseido… depending upon what their plans sre for the line, they’ll either gut it or diminish it by trying to appeal to a larger demographic . Whichever… it doesn’t bode well for the marque..
yes, let’s rerelease some oldies but goodies!!! Will they do that, perhaps in smaller (and thus more affordable) sizes? No, they will not.
What usually occurs with eponymous brands like Serge Lutens or as another example Giorgio Armani is that the age of the founder matters a lot. The big conglomerates that usually purchase these designer or perfumer names have to do an amazing job defusing the old age or retirement or “end of life” of the person.
In the case of Armani, the genius of L’Oreal made the name timeless despite his passing. The brand is still reaching teenagers. Unfortunately, Shiseido which owns Serge Lutens does NOT have that genius. They did EVERYTHING wrong! From the time they created those $650 gold private collections in 2016 or so which were awful, and so out of range in pricing from other super expensive brands like Tom Ford. No one bought them. And then the ill-thought rebottling of some scents in the Skyscrapers which did not sell. Then canceling out entire scents and putting them in bell jars and jacking up their price even higher. The naming of new fragrances was also unrealistic like La Couche du Diable which means The Devil’s Diaper…And many many more flops. And to make things worse, they made the unthinkable and unforgivable mistake of pulling out from the US market when Barneys went caput.
I mean it’s like saying “we don’t even need the largest and most important market and GDP on the planet”.
Now that Serge himself is probably older than hell and becoming irrelevant, Shiseido is scratching their heads and paying millions to consulting companies to see how to make the name and brand still relevant.
There’s a very wide space between the romanticism of perfumistas that start crying when a scent is discontinued and the “sales number” of that scent that were probably so dismal, they can’t justify placing another order of batch production.
Remember that production and assembly lines plus orders of caps and sprayers and all that game cost a LOT of money…
Wake up guys. It’s all about the profit. There are no dreams and art in big conglomerates, they want to convince you otherwise but only the sales numbers matter!
Hm, I agree with you to some degree. I’m cynical enough I’ve never bought into the “dreams and art” angle — at the end of the day, people want to make a buck. I view Armani in a slightly different view as more masstige — SL (idiotically) has always been harder to get ahold of. If I were queen, and I should be, I’d order SL to scrape together some re-releases of older scents in, say, travel coffrets at a lower price, rather than coming up with even stupider bottles than the existing ones — too tall or just too large and therefore extremely expensive. We could go on and on — the idea now of people (not just us weirdos) having a fragrance “wardrobe” rather than one or two signature scents that made the per-bottle expense a little less absurd. I’m not even going to try to attempt to figure out the historic math, but I wonder how much a bottle of, say, Arpege was in the 1950s or 1970s vs. average household income.
Interesting view.
I recall buying a few bottles direct from SL around 2010. They actually emailed me before shipping to check I wasn’t using a stolen card. They used my subscriptions email not the PayPal email to check. Then SL stood for excellence all round.
I bought Sarrasins after it had been out of stock expecting the leather jasmine of the original formula. Sadly I got a bell jar of a simple jasmine soliflore. I wasn’t alone. So sad.
and that’s the flaw in my fantasy — if they brought them back, would they be shadows of their former selves? Probably.
I’ll tell them what to do for a trip to Paris and free bell jars..
No thanks. Back in the day, before one could get just about anything online, I was buying things unsniffed with insane glee. A big part of the ‘glee’ was The Hunt. I probably bought every bell jar as soon as it was released and I was able to get a ‘shopper’ to procure it. Problem was, after all those purchases, I realized I disliked or despised every single Lutens in my collection. Whatever type of musk he used in his formulations was all I could smell when ever I wore any of these. My problem, of course. Added to that, the whole ‘Uncle Serge’ thing was a huge turn off to me. Hero worship was never my style, especially figuring that ‘Uncle’ was absolutely chortling all the way to the bank. Win some. Lose some. Yes, I know I am a pillock in the minority so no disrespect meant to all this perfumer’s fan base.
Hey, fair enough! I think many of us have a particular line that after the thrill of the hunt fades and we’ve tried enough of them, we come up against something like this. (Caron is mine.) And there is almost certainly some particular base / combo in there that puts you off, and you’re honest and comfortable in your tastes to admit it! I … think I actually started the “Uncle Serge” thing because I found it funny; kind of a step down off the Lutens Pedestal if that makes any sense (perhaps not). I’ve let go of the monetary consideration/laughing to the bank bc as far as I can discern, most fragrance manufacturing costs a tiny percentage of the retail price. Are we getting “value” for money? It’s an interesting discussion.
Thanks for being the voice of reason and kindness, March. I sat and thought for about an hour before I posted. I’m a (retired) working class nobber with delusions of grandeur as well as being a very blunt AuDHD individual. A long, long time ago I fell into some major disfavor (and a lot of off line bullying) for expressing my honest opinion of ‘Dinner by Bobo’ on a now defunct fragrance board. I think those were the days, the days of The Hunt-where it was considered best never to publicly say, after it took a person months to get their hands on a bottle of The Latest Thing from Europe, that the juice was a joke. Or it just plain stunk.
Oh, you are quite welcome, I’m always happy when you show up here. I liked Dinner by Bobo while also finding it entirely unmarketable outside niche-ville, like a high end practical joke. I’ll be honest, what I miss about “those days” is perfume releases being a trickle rather than a deluge, so we were all sort of experiencing and talking about the same scents at the same time. Nowadays I’m not even going to pretend I keep up — plus I no longer live in a major metro area where many (not all!) of the new releases could be hunted down in bulk for a sniff. I feel like we started this particular blog, at that time, as the decidedly less serious option? I’m no expert, you know? We like what we like.
No offense taken at all. Some of the house “base” notes don’t play well with everyone. Some people don’t like the Guerlainade base either. It’s about what works for you.
And I kind of grew out of the fan-boy pavlovian desire to own and follow every release about the time I stopped watching Apple keynotes.
Thanks very much, Tom.
I have the utmost respect and admiration for Andy Tauer. Most of his scents don’t work for me due to the ‘Tauer-ade.’ The only one I would grab if I had to throw together an ‘escape bag’ would be Cologne du Maghreb.
Those bottles are a hard no for me March. There’s no way my clumsiness would let that gorgeous thing survive. Same reason I only bought the travel sprays at IUNX.
Portia x
OH! And I still have a bottle of L’Eau du Navigateur, what a stunner.
I sold mine years ago in a fit of madness and am still kicking myself.
GRRR! I have many of those sad, maddening stories too March
Those bottles are absurd — aren’t the regular ones tippy enough? I wonder if a bunch of people looked at that container and said NOPE.
I think a bunch of people looked at the price & thought “Sod that for a game of soldiers!”
Actually what I thought about the grat ciels was way more potty mouthed
hehe I can imagine! What’s next, 30 inches tall and the width of a pencil?
Well there is the Cra-yon range of perfumes. Take about infantile
That sounds like the description of a male catfish on a horrendous first date. ?
hehehehehe TRUE
Wasn’t that Yohji?
Oh, yeah. I’m all in and will be looking for a sample after I write this.
You had me at dates and coffee.
I think you should be able to get ahold of a sample? I hope it winds up being worth your trouble.
Have a sample coming. Impatient!
Excellent!
The note description did not get my strong interest, but then you mentioned L’Artisan L’Eau du Navigateur which I love. That got my interest! Your opinion also helped. I’m going to hunt up a sample. If I were to buy a gratte-ciel bottle, I would just set in a cool mug such as yours that says, “F this $hit” or mine that says, “The futility of teaching giraffes to Celtic dance” , with a drawing, and on the other side it says, “BE YOU, THEY’LL ADJUST”. 😉 😉
HAHAHAHA yeah that’s a great idea. IF I wind up with a bottle of this (big “if”) it’ll get tucked into something that will hold it.
I think I must have. And it reads great. But I can probably get the same effect by layering some of the ones I have and save the $300..
That’s the thing — do we need any more fragrance? We do not. If I can find a decent price for a generous decant I’ll probably go that route.
I have and enjoy this one as well. Bought it a few years ago when it was dirt cheap because apparently it wasn’t popular. Not a fan of the skyscraper bottles because they are tall and tippy and the tiny black on black print is unreadable, but this one was only ever available in those bottles. I like El Attarine too but in small doses and only occasionally. Arabie is easier for me to wear, as well as PdE Aziyadé, when I want a cumin fix.
I need to order some more Aziyade, and I’m waiting on my sample of PG Fareb. I do love some cumin-y goodness.