Passage d’Enfer appeared in 1999, composed by Olivia Giacobetti to mark the turn of the millennium. L’Artisan Parfumeur works incense there in chiaroscuro and names it after the alleyway in the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris where the house had its offices in the 1970s. A translucent lily and white musks soften the balsamic smoke.
The black heptagon of the range, redressed in 2021 with a red case illustrated with the Paris alleyway and the spider lily.
At its release the fragrance had no container of its own: the house sold it wrapped in twists of paper, staged for the New Year’s Eve of the year 2000. Once success came, it joined the bottle of the eaux de toilette in the range.
The container is the one from La Collection, whose bottles Thomas Dunckley describes as angular heptagons. The overhaul of 2016 dressed them in black, the same year the house reworked its whole range. Robin regretted in March 2007 the earlier design: the bottle had therefore already changed once.
In 2021 the packaging was taken up again. The case takes on a blazing red aura and receives an illustration of the passage d’Enfer; the label carries the Asian spider lily that the Extrême version placed at the centre of its story. The sizes sold today are one hundred millilitres and ten millilitres.