L'Orpheline

With L’Orpheline, released in 2014, the fusing fougère creation transforms into a frosted incense to surprise us further with a warm and tenderly oriental base. Over time the poet’s wound has healed, and L’Orpheline, for its part, transforms its metallic ash into a new warm breath of life that sets our skin alight.

L’Orpheline, or when perfumed creation becomes the scented novel of Lutens’s wounds…

Each of us holds secrets and wounds, things unsaid and abandonments. Often artists choose to turn their original wounds into works of art, as if to better banish the shadows or have them made magnificent by the grace of melancholy. Often words are the weapons of this sadness; for Lutens, words become scents, and scents become words. L’Orpheline was born of these words, these childhood hurts.

L’Orpheline is the abandoned part of Lutens, that melancholic and prickly femininity that felt constantly abandoned by an unknown father, then hated, then forgotten. L’Orpheline depicts in perfume this state of abandonment, from the initial sharp pain to the peace finally found, wrapped in the warmth of that comfort.

It is memory, forgiveness, and in a way, what today might remain of it: dust. It is not only feminine but has no plural. Of my life, it is the sillage, what remains when everything has disappeared. It is the invisible which, veil after veil, where it is forgotten, unfolds in every shade of gray.

This fragrance, one of the most intimate from Serge Lutens, seizes on smoke-tinged memories to soar toward warmth and the Orient. Like an initiatory quest, L’Orpheline surprises and enchants.

L’Orpheline, this dust that turns into amber gold to create an “ashen oriental”

Far from bottles of ostentatious luxury, L’Orpheline comes in the house’s usual square bottle, without revealing so much as a hint of the fragrance we will have the pleasure of discovering. One should then rely only on the poet’s few words to accompany this rather lovely Orpheline, far from being as sad as she might appear.

Friable but whole. Half-spoken, its name cracks. Before the break, the first two syllables carry the name of the poet who could even charm stones. Serge Lutens on L’Orpheline.

Olibanum and aromatic notes open L’Orpheline with their frosted minerality. Fortunately a smoky incense, almost burnt, asserts itself against this original whirlwind to wrap it in stardust. Woody notes bring their touch of comfort to this warm smoke, preparing L’Orpheline to finally shed that feeling of ice. Finally, oriental depths irresistibly draw the incense toward the sweetness of comfort and the cottony warmth of white musks.

By general consensus, L’Orpheline is acclaimed as a masterpiece of perfumery, its olfactory construction around incense as precise as the calibration of a poem or a cathartic novel. In this scented story of L’Orpheline, everyone can find resonance with their own life journey.