L'Eau de Paille

Far from the usual fruity or aquatic fresh waters, with Eau de Paille Serge Lutens explores summer and takes us toward a sun-kissed, rural nature.

Eau de Paille, or the summer fragrance offered as an anti-summer fragrance!

Whatever the trends, Serge Lutens has never hesitated to compose olfactory works outside of time and outside of major marketing trends, in order to introduce us to his poetic and dreamlike world. With Serge Lutens fragrances, there is no point looking for pretenses or vague resemblances, each fragrance is a unique painting by the artist, devoured through the nostrils and intoxicating through the imagination.

This is how the gentle Eau de Paille was born in 2016. Far from its fruity, gourmand, aquatic counterparts, or all three at once, L'Eau de Paille resembles neither a classic summer water nor any Eau created previously within this same lovely collection. Rather than taking us toward liquid waters, Lutens prefers dry water and the smell of the field that has just been harvested. Because Eau de Paille is precisely made for those who do not like to get wet!

As for the visual and the film that the artist conceived, they are dominated by the same blonde color as the fragrance. A rural, dreamlike world where the scarecrow becomes the face of the campaign! Whether one should see in this an allegory gently mocking the grandiloquent star-making techniques of luxury perfumery, perhaps? It is up to each person to interpret it in their own way. Because a Lutens fragrance is shared, but what it offers is intimate.

The blondness of wheat to create a Serge Lutens of the harvest

The bottle in which the lovely harvested fragrance is presented does not differ from the three other Lutens waters previously offered (Laine de Verre, Eau Froide and Eau de Lutens). Only the label varies once again, offering what we might perhaps see as a straw hat framing its name? Once again, it is up to each person to interpret it in their own way.

The architecture of Eau de Paille draws its rich structure from a fragrant composition that is both simple and highly sophisticated. This lovely unisex fragrance opens on notes of vetiver, strikingly reminiscent of magnificent masculine fragrances. Then, in the creator's gentle irony, an aquatic freshness sweeps up our senses to better tame them, before losing them in a mistral of incense and grains, breathing its warm and sensual air into this bucolic symphony.

If the raw materials do not offer the originality that Lutens fragrances have accustomed us to, the bold composition of these few choice elements makes this work a brilliant success. Lutens waters do not seek to dazzle, nor do they seek to resemble their competitors, but rather to bring out pure and natural fragrances without ostentatious luxury. Eau de Paille reads like a beautiful novel, a beautiful story where lovers would have lain down in a great wheat field and would have left again...