Arabie: Dreams of the Orient... Those who love Serge Lutens perfumery love the oriental pleasures it delights in diffusing with each fragrance. The love story between the Orient and the perfumer-artist thus continues at the dawn of the new millennium with Arabie, a powerful gourmand, woody and musky oriental.
Since Féminité du Bois, Serge Lutens and his perfumer Christopher Sheldrake have never stopped intoxicating us with wonderful scents, original and powerful accords built from raw materials of absolute beauty and quality. Especially enamored with oriental lands, Serge Lutens likes to make us discover the Orient differently, as with the majestic Ambre Sultan or the gourmand Arabie. Arabie is thus not an oriental perfume but a perfume with the taste of the Orient, a major distinction that so well symbolizes the spirit of Serge Lutens...
The splendors of Serge Lutens' dreamed Orient in a languorous Arabie...
From the extraordinary Féminité du Bois and its revolutionary feminine woody accords, Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake found their path. The poet and the perfumer would from then on together design unique and unprecedented perfumes in a world where all is calm and sweet perfumed voluptuousness. Serge Lutens perfumes resemble no others, are sometimes crafted over many years, and undergo, so to speak, no commercial testing whatsoever. Serge Lutens perfumes are unique, and that is why they are so beloved.
So naturally, when the great Serge Lutens and his favorite perfumer set out to create an oriental perfume, it bears nothing in common with those found on today's market. Ambre Sultan is certainly one of the most emblematic, but Arabie is just as worthy for the entirely original vision of the Orient that master Lutens imposes.
You would smell a perfume, and it was a soup. One smelled either the sexy woman or the woman who handles files. For men, it was the Zorro costume. With Ambre Sultan, I wanted to break away from marketing's Adam and Eve, said Serge Lutens.
For Arabie, the demands were exactly the same. The man lives in Marrakech, so there was no question of settling for a few woody opulences to signify an oriental fragrance: that would have been an affront to his adopted land and to its tastes and its warm, intoxicating colors.
Arabie, between woody depths, sun-kissed warmth and candied gourmand character
Arabie thus bears nothing of a typical oriental perfume; rather, it would be closer to the scent of burning gingerbread than to a sensual oriental perfume of today. All of Arabie's scents lead to tastes and delights of the palate, all its accords of dried and candied fruits joyfully carry us into the arid deserts that Serge Lutens sends our way.
Arabie opens first with a two-part departure: on one side, laurel and mandarin offer their fine vitality, while brown date and dried fig turn syrupy. At the heart come the spices that lead this dance of the sun, where cardamom, nutmeg, clove and cumin blend into a gourmand ballet. Then gourmand yet powerfully woody tonka bean bridges these spicy warmths and Arabie's intense depths. Benzoin and labdanum unite, the better to let themselves be smoked by the mysterious presence of myrrh; we no longer know where we are, but we know we are there, deliciously well...