Coriandre: A sensual feminine fragrance signed by a female nose. Jean Couturier and his wife Jacqueline had a fragrant love at first sight that pushed them to create their own perfume house in 1972.
When Jacqueline presented the composition of Coriandre to Jean Couturier, who worked for Yves Saint Laurent, it was love at first sight. A romantic love at first sight, but also an olfactory one, which set the newly formed Couturier couple on a decisive path: creating their own perfume house. For Coriandre is a powerful olfactory phenomenon, and the two creators' intuition was right: they had a bestseller on their hands, a legendary perfume...
Coriandre, or the major work of the great perfumer Jacqueline Couturier
Coriandre was born of the talent of one of the rare female noses of the time, Jacqueline Couturier. The woman, born in the cradle of the finest French flowers, is talented, but this talent blossomed almost anonymously, as it was so difficult in the 1960s to assert oneself as a perfumer when this fine calling was entrusted mostly to men.
But the creator would eventually meet Jean Couturier in 1972 and present him with the latest of her compositions, made in tribute to her mother. Jean Couturier, then part of the Yves Saint Laurent perfume creation team, resigned from his position and decided, in just one year, to build their brand-new perfume house around this fragrance, which they would name Coriandre.
The least one can say is that Coriandre has all the makings of a successful perfume: the freshness of aromatic scents, the delicacy of high-quality flowers and the raw, sensual force of wild notes previously unheard of in feminine perfumery. Coriandre is considered the very first true chypre perfume in the history of modern perfumery; it is also, and above all, so beloved that it crossed into the new millennium without a wrinkle, keeping its legendary status intact.
Coriandre. All the scents of evening, and already the freshness of night, Jean Couturier said of Coriandre.
Coriandre, or the return to the wonderful scents of Grasse in a bottle
Beyond the magnificent contrasts that Coriandre sets in motion within its bottle, it is composed of 119 different essences that make it one of the masterpieces of perfumery and a legendary example of French know-how. Some women even credit it, according to the house of Jean Couturier, with the power to transform one's mood, erasing on its own, as if by magic, the gloom of a bad day...
Coriandre opens on very fresh notes of angelica and, of course, coriander. However, these lovely aromatic facets are soon disrupted by the opulence of orange blossom and the bold audacity of aldehydic notes, very much in vogue since Chanel No. 5. At the heart, jasmine and Grasse rose envelop the wearer in their beauty, along with a few powdery notes of precious iris. But freshness returns with a few sharp, green notes of geranium. Once again, the force is there. And the woody depths of this magnificent Coriandre do nothing to contradict this, as the raw animalic forces of civet, sandalwood, patchouli and vetiver sweep the wearer into their whirlwind.