Datura Noir: A spellbinding juice of sun-kissed and mystical sensualities. Of course, a great Serge Lutens can only be composed with a fantastic story, unprecedented sensations and scents from elsewhere, perhaps from an unknown planet?
Since 1992 and the famous, revolutionary Féminité du Bois, Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake have offered the fruit of their fruitful collaboration to all those seeking original and powerful scents, far from the usual classics of perfumery. Datura Noir, described as a dangerous fragrance, turns out in reality to be far more a gentle elixir than a powerful poison. The Lutens magic strikes again…
Datura Noir, the enchantress of Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake
Christopher Sheldrake and Serge Lutens met in Japan while Lutens was working for Shiseido. Between the two men, it was immediately an olfactory love at first sight, a professional certainty that would give rise to a fragrance that would forcefully launch all the others in the Lutens range: Féminité du Bois, of course!
From then on, the two men composed together absolute masterpieces of originality and poetry. Christopher Sheldrake, Chanel's second man, finds in his collaboration with Serge Lutens a way to explore every facet of his creativity, and Serge Lutens, for his part, sees in this man the ideal partner for all his fragrant desires (follies?).
With Datura Noir, Lutens wanted to explore the light-and-shadow facets of their olfactory territory. By invoking a poisonous flower, the master of words—who believes that fragrance has always been envisioned as a vehicle of expression—plays on our fears in order to conquer and surprise us all the better. And Datura Noir is no exception, so bewitching does the pretty flower seem with its sun-kissed and gloriously floral facets.
One question then arises: while Serge Lutens made us fear Hell with this new Datura Noir, might he not, on the contrary, be taking us on a visit to Paradise?
What if Datura Noir were a pretty, luminous, sun-kissed flower?
In the old days, when a witch was burned, a small Datura shrub was planted on the ashes of the pyre so that its roots would absorb the last malevolent energies… Serge Lutens for Datura Noir.
Once again, doubt creeps in, and the camphoraceous top notes of Datura Noir do little to reassure us. And yet the pretty Mediterranean citrus notes already let us breathe in top notes far more luminous than expected. In the heart, the mysterious smoke that surrounded this precious Datura Noir has completely dissipated, letting us glimpse genuine pieces of Paradise thanks to ylang-ylang and tuberose. Coconut, bitter almond and vanilla transport us definitively into gourmand, exotic Edens wrapped in the softness of white musks. Playfully, the great poet of words nevertheless sends us a touch of light-and-shadow heliotrope, to remind us that this paradise remains veiled in mystery.
Datura Noir would thus indeed be a pretty hallucinogenic flower that amuses itself by transporting us, at its own whim, between a flowering, sun-kissed paradise and deep camphoraceous smoke. Once again, one can be certain that the two accomplices of the Serge Lutens house have succeeded, with Datura Noir, in creating a fragrant composition that will never resemble any other.