Revisiting Lalique's Original Encre Noire

Summer Fields of Vetiver

Encre Noire is often referred to as a "modern" vetiver, and few can get through a sentence about it without mentioning Iso E Super, so let's just get that out of the way first: there's quite a bit of Iso E Super in Encre Noire. There, I said it. Let's move on.

Released in 2006 in a semi-opaque black cube bottle inspired by René Lalique's own 1913 "Biches" inkwell design, the perfume was created by Nathalie Lorson, an experienced professional in her second decade of high-profile designer output. It was a sensation almost immediately; the public embraced the glassmaker's "black ink" as if it were something avant-garde, innovative, or oddball, and its sales were brisk, with every fragrance community personality and blogger having their say. 

Oddly, few dwelled in any detail on Lorson herself, whose history includes her 1994 debut collaboration with Sophia Grojsman on Bvlgari pour Femme. After that, her portfolio gets a little hazy (rumors abound that she worked on something called Wish for Chopard, released in 1997), with her next confirmed fragrances, Dolce & Gabbana pour Femme, Boucheron Jaipur Saphir, and Chopard Casran, all appearing in 1999. Lorson has publicly mentioned that she loves working with vetiver, and yet had no known vetiver perfume to her name until Encre Noire, which I find interesting. While others may consider her contribution to the pantheon of vetiver perfumes to be austere and even a bit severe, I think it's a truly great vetiver fragrance that sits comfortably among its 20th-century predecessors in the genre, most notably the original Guerlain Vetiver from 1959. 

Spray Guerlain Vetiver on one wrist, and Encre Noire on the other, and it hits me: Encre Noire is merely an updated version of Jean-Paul Guerlain's first solo fragrance creation, and in my opinion, an improvement. Guerlain opened his composition with a dry bergamot and coriander accord that was puckeringly bitter-green and pungent; Lorson capitalized on vetiver's natural grapefruit facet, a result of nootkatone, a sesquiterpene ketone that occurs in both the citrus fruit and vetiver root, and used it to amplify vetiver's natural freshness in Encre Noire. Guerlain Vetiver only dwells on citrus for five minutes, after which it segues via tobacco into the main attraction, i.e., unadulterated vetiver, reputedly of the Bourbon variety. Encre Noire bridges its grapefruit fizz to a heart of both Haitian and Bourbon vetivers with what smells like a drop of natural cypress oil, although the effect is fleeting, at least to my nose. I'm sensitive to vetiver, and so even a suggestion of it overtakes my olfactory receptors and shoves me directly into its dense green thicket. 

Encre Noire's vetiver heart, just like Guerlain's, smells uncompromisingly of vetiver, vetiver, and more vetiver. I find that vetiver develops a sour quality with onion-like off notes, and I experience it here. I think the worst example of this is found in Route du Vétiver by Maître Parfumeur et Gantier. There, the onion quality is so pungent, and the vetiver extracts are so natural and concentrated, that it resembles the stink of sweaty, stuck-on-a-bus-for-three-days-in-Rome body odor vetiver, which is to say, not my absolute favorite kind. Fortunately, and unlike both Guerlain and MPG, Lorson's vetiver is fresher, brighter, airier. The root is there, but it's not covered in dirt and left in a wet clay pot. Instead, it's garnished with accents of citrus and evergreen, and the whole crisp affair is only passingly sweaty, which I can abide. The subtle but effective fixatives of base Cashmeran and Iso E Super disencumber the vetiver oils of their natural shortcomings, leaving a pristine, simple, and balanced fragrance that wafts pleasantly for hours at a very low hum that is unlikely to offend, even if overapplied. Encre Noire is, in a word, gorgeous. 

Vetiver will never be a "love" for me, as it isn't my favorite note by any brand or in any incarnation, but I accept Lorson's 2006 update to the traditional, straightforward vetiver genre, something that had, rather amusingly, gone extinct by that point in time. Guerlain Vetiver had always been the main reference for the material, and while I think it remains a very good fragrance, it smells of its time. Encre Noire, on the other hand, nods to that classic format while nudging the inherently dated olfactory profile of vetiver a few feet closer to the future. I like that Lorson did not try to reinvent the wheel here; she took advantage of vetiver's numerous facets and used a few key synthetics and naturals to highlight them and give them their time as her perfume develops. She extended the grapefruit/nootkatone facet on top, enhanced vetiver's woodiness with Cashmeran and Iso E Super in the base, and tickled the transitions with nuances reminiscent of green cypress needles, and to quote The Brownsville Herald, "That's all she wrote."