Le Lion: A woody-aromatic-floral masculine perfume by Lalique. After opening its perfumery in 1992 with Lalique de Lalique for women, the venerable glassworks and now perfume house offered its splendors to men with the perfume Le Lion in 1997.
The house of René Lalique offered for decades magnificent glass creations that adorned both the famous Orient Express and the perfume bottles of the great couture houses. When the celebrated glassworks sought to diversify, it naturally turned to perfumery, a field it had long been close to. It was not until 1997 that the first masculine Lalique perfume appeared, composed by the great Maurice Roucel, Lalique pour Homme Le Lion.
Lalique pour Homme, when Le Lion becomes a perfume…
The very first Lalique perfume referenced the bucolic, natural world that René Lalique, who made the Lalique glassworks famous, particularly loved. However, after offering magnificent feminine perfumes, the house wanted to offer men lovely natural worlds in the form of precious fragrant bottles. Thanks to the talents of Maurice Roucel, this was accomplished in 1997 with Lalique pour Homme Le Lion.
Maurice Roucel composed this first Lalique perfume, as he did with all his other creations, with passion and originality. He who likes to position himself as an explorer who wanders within formulas thus offered Lalique a Lion as fresh as it is refined, as elegant as it is definitively powerful.
The beauty of the accords of Lalique pour Homme Le Lion made it a great commercial success from its release, one that would find its yearly successors celebrating the art of Lalique's famous mascots in ever-creative masculine bottles. Thus Le Lion of 1997 would be joined by Sagittaire in 1999, Le Faune in 2000 and Equus in 2001.
Maurice Roucel signs an audacious masculine with Lalique pour Homme Le Lion
With his talents widely celebrated in the 1990s thanks to the fabulous Tocade of 1994 or 24 Faubourg by Hermès, Maurice Roucel could now afford to compose all his boldest creations. For Lalique pour Homme Le Lion, he thus dared a fresh, floral perfume with luminous accords contrasted by intense woody darkness, as if to better celebrate the animal the house wished to represent in its bottle.
By selecting the finest aromatic raw materials for Lalique's Le Lion for men, Maurice Roucel crafted top notes that are both particularly fresh and particularly Mediterranean. A Mediterranean spirit that we also find in the heart of this Lion, thanks to Pallida iris from Florence or jasmine from Grasse, which bring an absolute elegance to the initial freshness, just as Lalique's famous mascots once did on racing cars. Finally, we leave the warmth of these Provençal lands for scorching distant ones with intense woody notes of Indian sandalwood, Indonesian patchouli, oakmoss and amber accords.
Despite the beauty of their bottles and their fragrances, only two perfumes from this beautiful collection offered in tribute to Lalique's mascots remain: Le Lion and Equus. Although relatively different in their composition, these two fragrances play on the same contrasts between freshness and warmth to wrap men in a chiaroscuro halo. Could this be the secret to the success of Lalique's perfumes for men?