SOUL OF MY SOUL

For twelve years, Etat Libre d’Orange has been celebrating enlightenment through an awareness of beauty, goodness, sensitivity and intelligence. Our house has welcomed humankind in all its forms, as long as they try to contribute to The Perspective – the Renaissance concept of three dimensions in art which allowed for more realistic and profound depictions. And this perspective can be interpreted to extend beyond paintings.

Five hundred years ago, merchants confronted the two established orders :the Red (priests) and the Black (soldiers). They created a third path, cleansed of dictates, for the proliferation of the arts – and perfume. Etat Libre d’Orange honors the sons and daughters of the Renaissance by offering a trail of insight and alliance for their skin.

Think of Lucifer – from the Latin roots, lux (light) and ferre (to hold) – the shining one, light-bearing, like Venus when appearing as the morning star. Half a millennium to wear on the skin, and in its wake the majestic memory of the rose, the power of spices and the sense of something precious. The story of mankind delivered to you in a perfume.

ALCOHOL DENAT, PARFUM (FRAGRANCE), AQUA (WATER), BHT, GERANIOL, CITRONELLOL, CINNAMYL ALCOHOL, BENZYL BENZOATE, LIMONENE, BENZYL CINNAMATE, LINALOOL, CITRAL, HEXYL CINNAMAL, BENZYL ALCOHOL, EUGENOL, FARNESOL.

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.

He took on many roles: writer, revolutionary, philosopher, libertine. He disdained the social norms and he demanded unrestrained freedom. He questioned every assumption about love, beauty, even violence, and he ignored the taboos. He wanted to attack the sun and ignite the world, liberate us from our preconceptions, break down the barriers which keep us from accepting our own desires. We identify with him, because we try to do the same. Which is why Etat Libre d’Orange has chosen to celebrate a man who celebrated extremes. We have invited the Marquis de Sade to join our family of outrageous perfumes. He has accepted with pleasure . . . and maybe a little pain.

Etat Libre d’Orange and the Marquis de Sade. It’s a marriage made in heaven, or possibly in hell. Either way, it works. Together, we launch an assault on the sun.

To read Sade is to take a risk — one is suddenly forced to face one’s self, exposed. It’s a wonderful risk to take if you want to plunge yourself into the heart and the body of humanity. Because Sade liberates.
He pushes us to imagine and to desire, far beyond the boundaries which saturate our perspective.

“How many times, dear God, have I not longed to be able to attack the sun, snatch it out of the sky, create a general darkness, or use that star to ignite the world.”
As a creator of perfume, how could I open my perspective, imagine beyond my limitations? A very personal question. The cistus! One of my paradoxes. One of my gray areas.

I have always recoiled from the cistus, I’ve avoided it or hidden it under thick layers of vanilla and amber as a way of escaping it. This is why I have made myself confront a radical formula: the cistus, exposed, and in all its states.
My dear Marquis: here’s to your suns, to our volcanoes!

— Quentin Bisch, perfumer

From the depths of his prisons, Sade constantly reminded his contemporaries — and all men — of his injunction to go beyond compromise, to overcome conformity, and to always put freedom rst. To be yourself, without suffering the judgment of others; to be yourself and to live as you want to live… “All human happiness is in the imagination,” Sade reminds us. Sade was the freest man who ever lived. Sade is desire and passion, strength and tenderness, provocation and sensuality. His scent is the same: in nitely volcanic. Like his perfume, Sade cannot be banished, reduced to silence, made to disappear. He is there, always there: unforgettable. This is an eternal fragrance that endures just as his thought endures, beyond time.

— Hugues de Sade

ALCOHOL DENAT., PARFUM (FRAGRANCE), AQUA (WATER), LIMONENE, ISOEUGENOL, EUGENOL, GERANIOL, 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.

The curtain rises on a state at the corner of 69 rue des Archives, in the Marais, Paris. A place that is like a frontier, where the old world ends and the new world begins. The pale moon can be seen lowering over the towers of Notre Dame in the distance. A man and a woman are in a perfumery, surrounded by bottles. He has yielded in submission to a fallen sovereign and is condemned to the ultimate fate. She is the new soul, the new role, she is desirable and she has conquered. She is the denunciation, a touch condescending. The fluttering of her eyelashes declares she is the one whose hour of glory has arrived, a scent testing blotter in hand.

The date is November 16, 2019.

"- EXIT THE KING, a perfume to dream of entropy? Etienne, you're rambling, you have finally lost your mind. Entropy has nothing to do with perfume.

- Yes Lola, you heard correctly. EXIT THE KING, a perfume to dream about entropy. Don’t you think entropy is nice?

- Perched on the scaffold before the guillotine, you speak these three words like a farewell to the troubled world.

- There's nothing for you to understand, innocent child. This is about making a perfume like a Loire castle, a perfume that could rise higher than the castle of Blois, higher than the terrace where the last Valois watched the sun set in its glory. And then disappear, die, as if by magic before the fall. With the whisper of a kiss at the moment of its glory, and then a humble return to something else. A perfume of magnificence, love and goodness for the new world, and of forgetting the old and overwhelming powers. Resolutely chypre.

- Welcome to the new world, you mean?

- Yes Lola, provided it's modern and eternally chypre like this perfume."

EXIT THE KING.

ALCOHOL DENAT., PARFUM (FRAGRANCE), AQUA (WATER), BUTYL METHOXYDIBENZOYLMETHANE, ETHYLHEXYL SALICYLATE, BENZYL SALICYLATE, HYDROXYCITRONELLAL, LIMONENE, LINALOOL, EVERNIA, PRUNASTRI (OAKMOSS) EXTRACT, HEXYL CINNAMAL, CITRONELLOL, BENZYL ALCOHOL, GERANIOL, CITRAL, EUGENOL, ALPHA-ISOMETHYL IONONE, FARNESOL. 

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.