The Perfumes of Anatole Lebreton

Recently I had the great experience of testing all four perfumes in the sample kit offered by Anatole Lebreton. You can order the sample set here for €6.50 delivered within Europe (which is a great deal!). Here are my thoughts:

Bois Lumiere

Bois Lumiere begins with a green, slightly wet honey – a bit dirty, as if it’s just passed from the arse-end of a bee onto your skin. But that slightly awkward phase passes quickly, transitioning smoothly into a soft, dry haze of a scent – a sort of paean to lazy summer days spent lying amongst the tall meadow grasses, making daisy chains with your children. Tender and melancholic, Bois Lumiere pairs a sour-ish honey with sun-bleached woods and a dry immortelle note that smells more like dried hay than the usual maple syrup. What is interesting is that these slightly green-gold hay notes get submerged into a thick pool of beeswax, the whole scent turning on a dime from dry grass one moment to molten wax the next.

The notes make it sound like it’s heavy – but it’s not. It’s a luminous, almost transparent wear, with a scent close to the feel and smell of the steam coming off a cup of chamomile tea. In fact, when I sniffed this blind, I thought the immortelle was actually chamomile – there is a dried hay aroma to both. There is a charming rustic feel to Bois Lumiere, a sort of idealized picture of a day out in the country. I find this to be a characteristic of the four Anatole Lebreton perfumes I’ve tested – they all paint a very specific landscape or scene, using childlike brush strokes in the faux-naïve style to bring out primitive emotions and memories in the wearer. They’re real heart-tuggers, these perfumes.

Since it is a honey scent, is it animalistic? Well, yes, but only in the sense that the honey we eat at breakfast still has the heavy scent of the bee about it. Bois Lumiere is suggestive in the same way as the rose-honey-wax notes in Cologne Pour Le Soir are: not smelling of either urine or sex, but of the sweet and sour aroma of silk stockings slowly peeled from heated flesh, complete with the enticing scent of clean female fur at the end of a long day. That Bois Lumiere ends up in the same flurry of the warm vanillic resin of benzoin is another line drawn to the wonderful Cologne Pour Le Soir. Is there room for another slightly sour, slightly animalic honey-beeswax-benzoin perfume in my life? Maybe, just maybe…..

L’Eau de Merzhin

L’Eau de Merzhin is the standout of the Lebreton line, in my opinion. The opening has all the dewy, wet, greenness of real-life plants and grasses, as well as the unpretentious cheerfulness of meadow flowers like daffodils, mimosa, and wood violets. It is an opening thick with pollen and crawling with life.

It also strikes me that this could be the inverse of Bois Lumiere, in that L’Eau de Merzhin starts off in the damp undergrowth of a meadow at dawn and Bois Lumiere is the same meadow at high noon, complete with the honeyed smell of sun-baked hay. The opening is almost hallucinogenic in its dripping-wet, juicy ripeness, and I’m reminded of the breath-taking beauty of other famous floral openings, such as De Profundis and Ostara. Despite myself, I am moved, oh, I am moved! I am such a sap for openings like this.

L’Eau de Merzhin loses most of this stemmy verdancy when it transitions into the heart, which seems (to me) to share a common accord with Bois Lumiere, specifically that steamy chamomile tea or sun-baked hay aspect. But where the hay in Bois Lumiere is wrapped up in a sweet, molten beeswax and syrupy, grassy immortelle, giving it a sort of golden, lazy afternoon sort of atmosphere, the hay or chamomile tea aspect here is greener and more herbal. I sense the juicy, snapped-stalk touch of angelica here. Heading off into the drydown, the galbanum adds its pine-like coolness, as well as a touch of lime peel.

It’s great. Something about the midsection gives me pause for thought, though, as it reminds me strongly of the mossy, slightly soapy neroli-inflected musk in the dry down of Acqua di Parma’s Colonia Assoluta, even though there don’t seem to be any notes connecting the two. Perhaps there is some unlisted white musk in this, or even some neroli, who knows? Anyway, the mind association, however tenuously or incorrectly made, happens to be a pleasant one, as I’ve owned and loved Colonia Assoluta in the past. I would actually consider getting a bottle of L’Eau de Merzhin in the summer as a replacement for my Assoluta – I think it would work brilliantly, me horsing around with the kids on the beach, and smelling like salty hay, wet green grasses, and moss.

Despite what I’ve said about the greenness of this fragrance, though, the prevailing feel in the dry down is that of a sweet, grassy creaminess – there’s no sharp green sting in the tail here, just an utterly comfortable wear that happens to evoke a dew-wet meadow and the shadows of a forest edging it.

Incarnata

Incarnata is supposed to evoke the scent of a vintage lipstick, and for a few moments it does, with the quasi-stale mien of cosmetic wax created by that clash of sweet violet (or rose) and stern, grey orris root we’ve seen before in every cosmetic scent from Misia to Lipstick Rose. The only difference is that Incarnata ramps this lipstick accord to the nth degree, and it’s rather fun feeling like you’re being pressed up against a wall by a giant tube seething with violet ionones and iris rhizomes. It’s a lipstick on steroids, yo.

The heart is something I’m not so keen on. If this lipstick was a person, the middle section would be that awkward teen phase, complete with angry outbursts and the occasional bout of violence. Basically, Incarnata sidesteps the pillow-soft landing normally used in lipstick scents and instead pairs a rather black, aggressive myrrh with a sharp raspberry leaf note and a green-ish amber, fusing them into a sharp, almost mint-like green resinousness that slices through the cloud of lipstick prettiness like a shark fin.

The resin adds vigour and backbone to what might otherwise be (eventually) a very bland cosmetics accord. It’s bright and fresh, which is not something you can normally say about myrrh or amber. But on the other hand, the slight mint and vetiver undertones are simply unpleasant to my nose – there is something too jutting about the combination. I am left feeling like I am wearing a smear of old lipstick, cut with the brackish, stale vase water from a bunch of mint that someone left out on the kitchen windowsill for too long. I feel a bit cheated – I came into this expecting lipstick and a bed stuffed with rose petals and white musk with which to break my fall, but instead I’ve cut my foot on a broken bottle.

The drydown is a return to the lipsticky waxiness of the start, but now dialed down to a hush and supported by a very fine, iris-tinted suede (or suedois) base. It is creamy and slightly sweet, with only trace amounts of the green amber, resinous myrrh, and sharp raspberry notes still apparent here and there.

Still, though – that awkward midsection…hmmmm. Given my fondness for lipstick fragrances, it’s possible that I could train myself away from my aversion to the heart notes. But it gives me pause for thought. I think Incarnata is a scary, massive lipstick up front, which is what I like about it, but it loses the plot after the topnotes fade away. Half the point about lipstick fragrances is that they’re supposed to be taken at face value – they are fun, beautiful in a simple, girlish way, and we are not supposed to try and make a more worthy scent out of them. Incarnata tries to inject a dose of salt and resin and beardy intellectualism into my beloved lipstick wax and it just ain’t happening. It’s a good fragrance alright, maybe too ambitious for the genre it’s shooting for. Ultimately, it’s just not to my personal taste.

L’Eau Scandaleuse

Wow – what a massive opening! L’Eau Scandaleuse barrels out of the bottle like an enraged bull, all gasoline-soaked tarpaulins and leather chaps a la Knize Ten, its power coming from a turbo-charged tuberose that smells like smoked, charred rubber. Fuel, rubber, leather, smoke – it’s all there, upfront, ready to knock you off your feet. It’s an impressive opening, making me think briefly of the opening to Lonestar Memories with its orangey creosote note and rubber-tire-on-a-fire accord.

But like with Lonestar Memories, L’Eau Scandaleuse loses all its interesting, smoky, ugly rubber bits – the bits that make it interesting – very quickly, collapsing into a pleasant orange blossom-driven leather with a musky tuberose support. I want more drama! More smoke! And for longer! Maybe I should just bite the bullet and buy Knize Ten or Lonestar Memories.

Later on, L’Eau Scandaleuse reminds me strongly of Tubereuse 3 by Histoires de Parfums, which I own and like, but have to be in the mood for. The rubbery leather chypre under-dressing continues to be interesting to me, because the rubber cuts the creaminess of the tuberose and the soapiness of the orange flower. To me, this small kernel of leather smells very much like the stiff brown coat leather (with mossy, coriander-leaf undertones) in my vintage Jolie Madame and Miss Balmain – that leaf-mulchy, murky brown-grey-green type of leather accord that feels stout and old-fashioned. It’s very 1970’s actually, and I like it. But – ack! Do you spot a common refrain here? L’Eau Scandaleuse reminds me too much of perfume that I already know and love. It’s beautiful but lacks the stinging slap of the new.

All in all, four very solid, even beautiful perfumes by Anatole Lebreton, with a classicizing bent and a respect for quality materials that is very evident. Everyone should test these, especially if you are someone who has seen what other non-classically trained perfumers have had to say in the past few years, such as Liz Moores of Papillon, and Hiram Green, and are excited to see what another talented, passionate perfume maker can add to that conversation.