Lalique pour Homme "Lion" EDP (Lalique)

When I ponder a brand like Lalique, I consider the bottles before their contents. How could I not? As a student of art history, I am well aware of René Lalique’s historically significant jewelry and glasswork. He was arguably the most versatile glass artist of the first half of the 20th century (he died in 1945), and his contributions included inkwells, hood ornaments, and the design and manufacture of luxury perfume bottles for fragrance industry giants like François Coty (Chypre), Mary Dunhill (Flowers of Devonshire), and Jacques Guerlain (Bouquet de Faunes), among many others.

It is with pleasure that I hold Lalique pour Homme, the original “Lion” EDP version from 1997, in hand. It is a marvel of vertical, squared-off Art Deco geometry with an Art Nouveau flourish in the form of a lion’s head rendered in reverse relief. Every detail of this bottle design is well conceived, from the gentle curves of its sides to its metal shoulders and cog-shaped cap, which is also bizarrely reminiscent of classical Greek dentil molding. It is possibly the most beautiful bottle in my sizable collection, and I tip my hat to the Lalique Group for honoring their legacy with this degree of artful packaging. Well done.

The perfume within is by Maurice Roucel, who by 1997 had tinkered conservatively at the periphery of the male fragrance market with the understated Eros Homme (1990) for Tristano Onofri and the equally low-key R (1995) for Révillon. It is no surprise to me, then, that Lalique pour Homme is a barbershop dream of a woody-oriental fougère, with a subtle, streamlined design of its own: soft, bittersweet grapefruit, lavender, rosemary, sandalwood, sugarless vanilla in the vein of Caron pour Un Homme, a microdrop of patchouli, and a powdery mossy musk. There is no oakmoss or treemoss listed on the box, but I do detect something powdery and oakmoss-adjacent in the base accord, which I will return to in a moment.

It reads as perfectly simple, and its material quality is high enough for me to parse each note clearly. It reminds me of Clubman Classic Vanilla aftershave, and by extension, Caron Le Troisième Homme, minus the jasmine. Roucel’s scent is frequently likened to Creed Bois du Portugal (1987), and I think its dusty lavender and sour sandalwood are responsible for that particular comparison. I can agree, but the two aforementioned fragrances outweigh the Creed comparison for me. Maurice Roucel is incredibly talented, and he managed to capture a 1970s or ’80s gentleman’s cologne vibe on a budget without sacrificing quality. His creation smells crisp and fresh, yet sturdily masculine, with dry herbs and woods. It is an olfactory statement: “I am a true gentleman.”

I love this fragrance. I have read reviews where authors contextualize it as “a dying breed” and “the last of its style,” with yet more comparisons to classics like Patou pour Homme, Cardin pour Monsieur, and Arden Sandalwood, but I am not so sure. Yes, the staid earthiness of the traditionally French lavender-sandalwood-oakmoss fougère speaks to that fading lineage, but Roucel cleverly added a very dry and ephemerally powdery orris note, like a pale gemstone in the center of an otherwise austere landscape of clean lines and muted tones. It hints at the makeup-powder iris fragrances that would follow.

The orris-laden Deauville by Michel Germain, released two years later, smells like a logical next step after Lalique pour Homme, as does the ambery and conservative Allure Homme, also released in 1999. Eventually, this desiccated and diffusive woody-floral style reached its apotheosis nearly ten years later in Dior Homme (2005). So it is not contradictory to view Lalique pour Homme as an old-school fragrance that also foreshadowed things to come.

Ultimately, it is simply a pleasurable barbershop fougère for me, something I will pair with Clubman aftershave on facial hair management days, when Brut feels a little too gauche or Azzaro feels too aggressive and macho. Lalique pour Homme is the guy who makes the girls grin by wearing a sport jacket to lunch, and who still has a landline phone in his apartment because his mom is hopelessly cellphone illiterate.

He is, in a word, charming.

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." 

Encre Noire (Lalique)

Iso E Super is just another synthetic aroma chemical, no more or less evil than the lot of them. Like most chemicals, it gets misused, but it is also used very nicely. A clumsier treatment can be found in Bleu de Chanel, where the material smells like olfactory overkill in a high-strung woody amber. Cartier's Déclaration is a vastly better fragrance that uses the stuff for a typical "buzzy" wood effect, which elevates the prominence of other notes in its composition instead of filling in for them. What's the difference in quality here between these two fragrances? It's splitting hairs, but BdC relies heavily on that "buzzy" sheer wood effect to act as a note (it depends on Iso E Super), whereas Déclaration benefits by using Iso E Super as a bit player in an otherwise independent composition that could work quite well without it. Jean-Claude Ellena seemed to feel that the material added a useful degree of texture and depth to woody and spicy accords, and I think he was right.

Nathalie Lorson must have harbored a unique philosophy about this approach when Encre Noire was composed. One thing that is obvious about this Lalique scent is that the perfumer recognized the cog-like purpose of Iso E Super, and mated it to several dry, saturnine woody notes. 

Yet unlike other scents in the same vein, Encre Noire's composition reverses the paradigm by allowing the chemicals that resemble "natural" materials (vetiver, cypress, black pepper, cashmere wood, birch tar) to complement Iso E Super. Under most circumstances this probably would not work very well, but going "whole hog" with the dark and smoky angle is what makes it smell so appealing. Its full-bore dryness is reminiscent of Arden's Sandalwood for Men, minus the lavender and patchouli, and with vetiver and "precious woods," which is really just Cashmeran, dialed up to the max.

The Iso E Super pushes through these dour notes like moonlight through tree branches, and the "buzz" is quite welcome for a change. Its transparent energy lifts and swirls the hyper-masculine pyramid through a gamut of inkiness, leatheriness, and even a decidedly agnostic incense note, and guess what? It smells great. Despite being relatively cheap, Lalique's vetiver-themed fragrance comes in a lovely bottle (we would expect nothing less), its contents akin to the papery rootiness of Guerlain Vetiver, the clean woodiness of Terre d'Hermès, the shadowy starkness of Chanel Sycamore, and the sheer radiance of Malle's Vetiver Extraordinaire. I've read questions asking where to find the best contemporary vetiver. To me, this is a top contender for that title. It draws on the seriousness of the old-school, but imparts a casual, sophisticated air, thanks to an enduring tension between traditional woody-chypre elements and contemporary synthetics.