FESTIN

Eau de Parfum

In 1831, Honoré de Balzac wrote a novel about a piece of leather that grants every wish. The catch: with each desire fulfilled, the skin shrinks. When the skin is gone, so is its owner. He called it La Peau de Chagrin. The skin of sorrow. The material and the emotion in the same word.

Raphaël de Valentin is a young man in Paris who’s broke, brilliant, and ready to throw himself into the Seine. He wanders into an antique shop instead. The old dealer shows him a piece of shagreen, wild onager skin, with an Arabic inscription that promises to fulfil every desire its owner has. But there’s a catch: with each wish granted, the skin shrinks. And when the skin is gone, so is the owner.

Raphaël takes it. Obviously. He wishes for wealth, for a banquet (literally called “le festin” in the text), for love, for status. And he gets all of it. But the skin contracts visibly with every fulfilment. He tries everything to stretch it back. Science, alchemy, machinery. Nothing works. The more he wants, the less of himself remains. He dies, consumed by the very mechanism that gave him everything.

With Festin, Bertrand Duchaufour has built a fragrance from materials that enact the same paradox.

Consider oud. Agarwood produces its precious resin only when infected by a mould. The tree floods itself with this dark, aromatic substance as an immune response. The luxury is the pathology. You cannot separate them. And that inseparability runs through every starring note in Festin. Caviar is the roe of a hundred-year-old sturgeon driven to the edge of extinction by the appetite for it.

Truffle grows underground in total darkness, in symbiosis with its host, and begins to rot within days of being unearthed: peak value and peak decay are the same moment. Blackberry at its deepest purple-black is a fruit on its last day, its flavour most intense at the threshold of collapse. And shagreen, Balzac’s title material, the rough granular hide that once covered samurai sword hilts and the snuffboxes of Louis XV’s court, carries both meanings of “chagrin” in French: the leather and the grief.

What does it mean that every material in this perfume follows the same pattern? Infection, extraction, near-extinction, decay. The beautiful thing and the destructive thing fused at the molecular level. And what does it mean that we desire it more because of this? That the rarity created by our own overconsumption becomes the reason for the cost and the value?

In Festin, desire is a consuming force that eats itself. And perfume is the perfect object to hold that argument because it sits in both worlds simultaneously. It is a cultural work that can carry a message. It is also a luxury commodity that participates in consumption. Duchaufour is an artist who’s created a work where the critique and the participation coexist at the same table inside the bottle.

Composition:

• Blackberry, Violet Leaf, Truffle
• Shagreen Leather, Caviar, Marine Note
• Oud, Ambergris

Perfumer: Bertrand Duchaufour, 2026

inci list: alcohol denat. (sd alcohol 40-b), parfum (fragrance), tetramethyl acetyloctahydronaphthalenes, benzyl salicylate, citrus limon peel oil, limonene, hexamethylindanopyran, juniperus virginiana oil, pinene, ethylhexyl methoxycinnamate, citrus aurantium bergamia peel oil, isoeugenyl acetate, linalyl acetate, linalool, ethylhexyl salicylate, cananga odorata oil/extract, butyl methoxydibenzoylmethane, citral, terpineol, beta-caryophyllene, isoeugenol, terpinolene, benzyl benzoate, alpha-terpinene, geranyl acetate, camphor, anise alcohol, benzyl alcohol, geraniol, carvone, eugenol