LA COULEUR DE LA NUIT

EAU DE PARFUM

Soundtracked by swooning melancholic strings, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite silk cheongsam sways sensually through quiet 1960’s back streets under flickering streetlights. She is carrying a jade green enamelled food pail and seems almost too beautiful to be real, her cat-flick eyes and immaculate hair, body emboldened by the exquisite silk.

This is a description of Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love, directed by visionary auteur Wong Kar Wai, one of the most sublime films ever made. A story of slow burning desire between two people who suspect their respective spouses are having an affair. In languid consideration of how this might have unfolded, they inadvertently light a smouldering flame to their own feelings.

The film is about the unsaid, sublimating desire, but this only serves to heighten every look, touch and it is this mise en scene that inspires La Couleur de la Nuit.

Intriguingly it is lavender that gives La Couleur de la Nuit its sultry ambiguity. Used with skill and imagination it can sing a potent song of bruised indigo.

Camille and Isabelle have used the lavender as a twilight colour wash, seared at the edges and shadowed. It acts like the shadowy streets of late night desire. It is perfectly complimented by rose geranium, one of the most beautiful materials used by perfumers, the rubbed green furry softness of the leaves and the smudged rose facet that develops so elegantly on skin.

Both materials are wrapped in a voluptuous vanilla note, orchidaceous and unctuous, echoing the Tahitian childhood of Isabelle Doyenne. Fir balsam is a fascinating addition to the composition of La Couleur de la Nuit. It provides a green hue of abandonment to perfumes, a whiff of burnt churches in arctic forests. It smells like ghosts and secrets. Anchored in a cocoa-leaning patchouli, this beautiful perfume captures the colour of twilight assignations and enigmatic blooming of love.

Composition

• Lavender
• Bergamot, Geranium
• Fir Balsam, Patchouli, Vanilla

Perfumer: Camille Goutal, Isabelle Doyen, 2020

inci list: Alcohol Denat., Parfum (Fragrance), Aqua (Water), Linalool*, Limonene*, Geraniol*, Citronellol*, Coumarin*, Citral*, Farnesol*, Eugenol*, Benzyl Alcohol* (Alcohol from organic farming . * made from ingredients of natural origin.)