THE AFTERNOON OF A FAUN

  A perfume is a mixture. A mixture like miscellanea that clash between words and materials to explain just a little, without explaining too much, the why of a perfume. Frustration.

  During a summer a few years ago, while walking on the Ramblas in Barcelona, I listened to a song by Rare Bird, an English band of progressive rock from the 70s. The song was called Sympathy, and the chorus was "and sympathy is what you need my friend, and sympathy is what you need my friend cause there's not enough love to go ‘round, No, there's not enough love to go ‘round...". And there, suddenly, with the richness of a whole psychoanalytical past (according to Lacan), this same past which sometimes foists my strength on others or sometimes my great weakness on myself, there emerged from the refrain a word stronger than sympathy. It planted its black flag of melancholy in the heart of my mind, and issued forth a word more correct, more vast, more true, more sincere, more useful since forged in the experience of life: FRUSTRATION.  And then to sing again in my head the substituted refrain "...And frustration is what you need my friend, and frustration is what you need my friend."  

  Frustration, the eldest daughter of renunciation and the sister of perfume, since perfume proceeds like frustration in the game of love.

  It gives by taking up, a fullness never satisfied, an enjoyment started but never achieved, an infinite movement of desire without completion, without apotheosis, an instillation that excites, seduces, lulls, dominates and annoys like a Bolero by Ravel. Frustration.

  So take a vanilla bean, a garden rose with swollen red petals, some old rum exploding with amber woods, a bourbon vetiver, bring each of these materials to your senses. Frustration.

  Breathe, taste the circulation of the unheard of beans, delectable fermentation but never enough, where one asks for more, all nostrils out, ... "More, more, let us take your redness deeper, and become this animal with the dull mind of the child who wants to enjoy and devour even more this chestnut wood, this cinnamon or this vetiver until bursting, and then to bathe satiated in the poetry of the smell." Frustration.

  This is the love game of perfume, this is the game of love according to Musset, Shakespeare or Racine. And it is so much the better because satisfaction kills whereas desire makes you live by creating movement through the ever renewed distance, so as to never consume like a homicidal ogre. Frustration.

  Happy are the consumers of desire, unhappy the consumers of enjoyment.

  Frustration, a perfume to awaken the strong child in the fragile adult or the fragile child in the too-strong adult, a perfume for a regressive journey to the dominion of vanilla, rum and vetiver.

  An extraordinary State of Orange that you have to reach in order to live passionately between the child and the adult with the memory of what’s missing.

ALCOHOL DENAT., PARFUM (FRAGRANCE), AQUA (WATER), COUMARIN, BENZYL SALICYLATE, LIMONENE, LINALOOL, BENZYL ALCOHOL, ISOEUGENOL, CINNAMAL, CITRAL. 

The ingredients in Etat Libre d'Orange products are updated regularly. Before using an Etat Libre d'Orange product, please read the list of ingredients on its packaging to ensure that the ingredients are suitable for your personal use.

MERGER OF THE MATTER, BIRTH OF THE SPIRIT.

It is a night of pale moonlight, a night toward the end of the 20th century, a night when the old world is ending and the new one is beginning. It is a night when one trembles to boldly lower the sacred cross against the heart, to aid in the passage to fatherhood.
So, as a crucifix, that night I pick up Hyperion, a novel by Dan Simmons. This is a masterful science fiction saga that celebrates the infinite legend of the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a 20th-century researcher, paleontologist, theologian and philosopher.
And I read, pacified, until the reflections of the dawn, until the first golden rays of the East. I read the future of man, the celebration of transhumanism and the qualitative leap of humanity enhanced by machine. I have rarely loved a book this much, I have rarely loved a thinker this much.

I read that night what a man thought he saw in the tombs of time.

I am a lover of words in the service of materials when they come together to make poetry in the bottom of our bottles; thus, a few years ago, I bring up the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to one of the last living vestiges of the triumphant 20th century, and I ask him: - "Then Teilhard de Chardin, precursor of genius?" A look, a silence and for the answer four unexpected words, four words whispered by my father: "GHOST IN THE SHELL".
This is the act of birth that makes the spirit of perfume. The rest is poetry to live on the skin.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin died in 1955, but his spirit continues to travel. This fragrance extends it through an alliance with the Japanese artist Shirow Masamune to transcend the spirit of Earth.

By mixing biotech and natural materials, this perfume silently celebrates the wake of the future and also whispers of a day to come, by providence or chance, when humanity is reunited and organized. A day when all consciousness is summoned by the infosphere to constitute a superior being and pass from the inert to the living. As the molecules assemble to make the living, we will then make a qualitative leap that becomes the starting point and arrival of transhumanism.

This perfume is the future. It comes to us from the 20th century.

The Ghost in the Shell, a perfume that speaks of the human phenomenon and its paradox, a perfume to wear on oneself ab libitum, at one’s pleasure. A perfume as a propagation towards the other, that makes you the axis and the arrow of evolution; modern, indeed! From the bottom of the matter, rise up.

Etienne de Swardt

ALCOHOL DENAT., PARFUM (FRAGRANCE), AQUA (WATER), BUTYL METHOXYDIBENZOYLMETHANE, BENZYL SALICYLATE, ALPHA-ISOMETHYL IONONE, LIMONENE, COUMARIN, CITRONELLOL, LINALOOL, CITRAL, BENZYL ALCOHOL, ISOEUGENOL, BENZYL BENZOATE, GERANIOL. 

The ingredients in Etat Libre d'Orange products are updated regularly. Before using an Etat Libre d'Orange product, please read the list of ingredients on its packaging to ensure that the ingredients are suitable for your personal use.

We all have shadows, even at night in the dark forest. You may call yours by another name: your invisible friend. Your conscience, your soul, maybe even your complementary ego. Your shadow could have a name, like Hermann. Or your shadow could be your perfume. This is your companion. You can argue with your companion, you can challenge your companion, you can test the boundaries of your own attitudes. You can debate the finer points of existence. But you cannot lose this companion, not ever. This is your alternative self. As you move through life and contemplate its meaning, you ask unanswerable questions. When you're overwhelmed with uncertainties, look to your shadow. Maybe you'll get a response. Maybe not. But at least you'll have an interesting conversation.

The night was so black and the forest very dark. By my side, Hermann seemed to me like a shadow. Our horses were galloping. Guardians of god! The clouds in the sky looked like marble. The stars flew through the branches of the trees Like a swarm of firebirds.

I am full of regrets. Broken by suffering, Hermann's deep spirit is empty of hope. I am full of regrets. Oh my loves, sleep! Yet, while traveling through the green solitude, Hermann says to me: “I am thinking about half-opened graves. ”And I say to him:“ I think of closed tombs. ”

He looks ahead: I Iook back, Our horses gallop across the clearing; The wind brings to us from far away the sound of the angelus bell; he says: “I think of those who are afflicted by existence, Of those who are, those who live”. “Me,” I say to him, “I think of those who are no longer! ”

The fountains are singing. What do the fountains say? The oaks are murmuring. What do the oaks murmur? The bushes are whispering like old friends. Hermann says to me, “The living never doze. At this moment, some eyes cry, other eyes are awake. ”And I say to him,“ Alas! Other eyes are asleep! ”

Hermann then continue. “Misfortune, that's life. The dead no longer suffer. They are happy! I envy Their graves where grass grows, where trees shed their leaves. Because the night caresses them with soft flames; Because the sky beams peace upon all their souls In all the tombs at the same time!

And I say to him, “Be quiet! Respect the black mystery! The dead are lying in the ground under our feet. The dead, these are the hearts that once loved you This is your expired angel! This is your father and your mother! Do not dismay them through bitter irony. As in a dream, they hear our voices. ”

ALCOHOL DENAT., PARFUM (FRAGRANCE), AQUA (WATER), ETHYLHEXYL METHOXYCINNAMATE, BUTYL METHOXYDIBENZOYLMETHANE, ETHYLHEXYL SALICYLATE, LIMONENE, EUGENOL, ALPHA-ISOMETHYL IONONE, ISOEUGENOL, LINALOOL. 

The ingredients in Etat Libre d'Orange products are updated regularly. Before using an Etat Libre d'Orange product, please read the list of ingredients on its packaging to ensure that the ingredients are suitable for your personal use.

In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote, “LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities.” It’s the city described by Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall as the city where “the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light.”

But they come, the dreamers, for the sunshine and the possibilities, to this land of opportunity, where hope springs eternal. Whatever they’re searching for — happiness, love, money, fame — the temptations lure them deeper and deeper into this concrete paradise.

Does Los Angeles have a scent? It’s impossible to say. But Chandler Burr knows Los Angeles. And Chandler Burr knows perfume. So we decided to collaborate on a fragrance that an LA woman might wear. And we gave it the name of Chandler’s novel, set in Los Angeles.

And you dreamers, with your dreams — you might flourish, you might wither, but you don’t give up. You keep coming, or you think about coming, and sometimes you stay.

Because someday, someone just might be looking for you, pointing at you, wanting you. Or someone like you.

“A few years ago I wrote a novel called You Or Someone Like You set in Los Angeles. Its central character is a woman, Anne Rosenbaum, who lives in the Hollywood Hills with her husband, Howard, a movie studio executive. Like so many of the homes up the fantastical curves and canyons of the Hills they look down on LA’s Downtown skyscrapers and the concrete ribbon of the 101 freeway, across Mid-Wilshire and Robertson, the glass towers of Century City, and, on clear days, over the 405 to Santa Monica and the placid, blue Pacific. And always the palm trees, imported and planted in LA in the early 20th century, ‘just as I am an import,’ Anne observes, ‘now indigenous.’ Anne is English, born in Hammersmith, London.

“As many have observed, Los Angeles is not a city. It is a state of mind. A strange amalgam of places and languages. Los Angeles is rivers of cement highways and infinite strips of asphalt, traffic, and despite or because of it all one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places on earth, a natural beauty made by nature and molded by people, cobalt sky and the greens and tans of the desert parks, ocean fog, the white and delicate pale yellow jasmine and honeysuckle flowers that grow up parking signs reading ‘Permit Parking Only Violators Will Be Towed.’

“This scent is very specific. When Etienne de Swardt approached me about creative directing a fragrance whose name would be the title of my novel, I told my perfumer, Caroline Sabas, that we were creating the fragrance Anne would wear. She is also very specific. Coolly crisply English, covered in but untouched by the silver, materialistic movie industry, literary, somewhat removed.

“You Or Someone Like You is not the ‘scent of LA’ or ‘the smell of the Hollywood Hills captured.’ It is not one of those olfactory synecdoches. It is, on the other hand, stylistically and in its technical construction what a Los Angeles woman would wear in my view. Caroline and I discussed this at each step during the creation process. It is contemporary, 21st century. It is LA, whatever that means, though in part it means the norms a scent would follow in a meeting at one of the agencies near Wilshire, at a studio, at a lunch in Bel Air or dinner off Beverly Drive. (The raw materials are completely irrelevant. The work is the work. If you need to know what it’s made of, don’t wear it; You is not for you.)

“My fictional Anne wears it; so presumably do thousands of other women. It represents her only in the way all such choices represent us. What it will be to you is for you to decide, obviously.”

— Chandler Burr

You or Someone Like You is a welcoming fragrance: neither off-putting nor strange. It is a contemporary creation built around timeless materials.

It embodies the women of LA — someone like Anne Rosenbaum: cool and crisp; once foreign but now indigenous; very exposed to Hollywood’s silver screen dreams yet untouched by its materialistic machinery. Anne finds comfort in literature, and the garden of her home, which nestles in the hills overlooking downtown LA.

The scent represents her only in the way all such choices represent us. It can be concrete, like a beautiful green rose. Yet, it can be abstract, just like an Erik Satie composition for it is a puzzle so mysterious that it is difficult to unravel.

The perfume invigorates the senses with its fresh, inviting appeal. One feels good wearing it.

— The Perfumer

ALCOHOL DENAT., PARFUM (FRAGRANCE), AQUA (WATER), LIMONENE, LINALOOL, CITRONELLOL, GERANIOL, CITRAL, EUGENOL, METHYL 2-OCTYNOATE.

The ingredients in Etat Libre d'Orange products are updated regularly. Before using an Etat Libre d'Orange product, please read the list of ingredients on its packaging to ensure that the ingredients are suitable for your personal use.