Fleur du Mâle

The 2007 press release, relayed by FashionNetwork, plays on paradox: Kurkdjian lets the orange blossom bloom at both ends of its register, vivid freshness up top with petitgrain, sensuality at the base with coumarin. In the image of Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, the house brings forth a fragrance of ambivalence, fragility and virility.

A white flower for a man

Jeanne Doré, on Auparfum, in June 2007 considers it an ambiguous androgyne, a startled virgin with virile, lurid leanings: Kurkdjian loves orange blossom so much that he composed a masculine around it, starting from his best-seller Le Mâle, for a new oddity in perfumery.

Thomas Dunckley, on The Candy Perfume Boy, recalls in 2011 that Fleur du Mâle arrived twelve years after the tour de force of Le Mâle, with a name that plays on Baudelaire, from a house that does not shy away from controversy; he ranks it among those gone too soon.

A discontinuation and a return

Withdrawn from the catalogue for years, sought after secondhand, Fleur du Mâle returns in 2026, Paris Select announces in September: the house keeps the orange blossom, the petitgrain and the coumarin, and adds bergamot, juniper, geranium, cinnamon and vanillin. Here is the 2007 Eau de Toilette; the reissue has its own page.