Etat Libre d'Orange - Like This, Tilda Swinton

The warm smell of home

The famously unconventional beauty, Tilda Swinton collaborated with the famously unconventional perfume house, Etat Libre d'Orange, on their latest perfume, Like This.

Inspiration for the perfume came from a poem that Swinton loves called "Like This."

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God’s fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.

Keep your face there close.
Like this.

Swinton asked for a perfume that she could travel with, one with the smells of ease, simplicity and the spirit of the home in Scotland that she cherishes.

The warm ginger of new baking on a wood table, the immortelle of a fresh spring afternoon, the lazy sunshine of my grandfather's summer greenhouse, woodsmoke and the whiskey peat of the Scottish Highlands after rain.

Notes of tangerine, ginger and pumpkin are obviously references to Swinton's red hair. This is the only perfume I know of with a pumpkin note but Etat Libre d'Orange makes some of the most unusual perfumes. Then again, this pumpkin is surprisingly wearable. It's not gourmand; it doesn't feel like I'm wearing pumpkin pie, or some kind of candle scent, but it is warm and it does smell orange.

The pumpkin is like freshly carved flesh with the seeds still stuck to it. The ginger is lightly spicy and smells almost wet at first, with a curl of tangerine peel. There's a nutty smell, like a hint of nutmeg and a woodiness, like the skin of the ginger roots and vetiver and maybe woody licorice roots. Like This also has a sweet note like warm grasses with wildflowers and hay.

Like This is a very comforting perfume, like a warm, dry kitchen while it rains outside; a cup of ginger and licorice tea; the smell of something baking; skin. The next morning, there's still a nice warm muskiness on my skin.

House: Etat Libre d'Orange
Nose: Mathilde Bijaoui
Notes: yellow tangerine, ginger, pumpkin accord, immortelle flower, Moroccan neroli, Grasse rose, vetiver, heliotrope, musks

Etat Libre d'Orange - Putain des Palaces

She wore wore lipstick, he wore leather gloves... and brought marzipan.

Hotel slut. Well, they don't beat around the bush (so to speak), do they? Etat Libre d'Orange is a house devoted to quirky perfumes. Putain des Palaces is meant to evoke sensual fantasies of a woman dressed for seduction, a meeting in an anonymous room, temptation and intimacy.

It's pretty accurate, actually, but it smells like an assignation from decades ago, when a woman in expensive makeup smelled a certain way. PdP opens with a juicy tangerine that highlights a thick rose and violet bouquet. The rose and violet together smell like old-fashioned face powder and creamy lipstick, perhaps left smeared on a collar. I think only Chanel lipsticks still smell that way.

There is a man in the room too. He's wearing soft leather gloves and a light spicy cologne with ginger and violet leaf. For a while PdP is all about this couple, the woman in her seductive floral paint and the man with the leather gloves. But as PdP sits longer on the skin it takes a surprising turn, it becomes a gourmand. Sweet, sexy amber comes out from under the leather, gets sweeter and starts to smell like almonds. PdP becomes a chewy marzipan treat. Perhaps the lover brought it as a gift?

Putain des Palaces is bit of afternoon delight.

House: Etat Libre d'Orange
Nose: Nathalie Feisthauer
Notes: rose absolute, violet, leather, lily of the valley, tangerine, ginger, rice powder, amber, animal notes