I was going to start this review by saying that despite having studied French literature in college, my only experience with Baudelaire was with his poem Les Fleurs du Mal, but then I Googled to see where the phrase Luxe, Calme, et Volupté was from and saw that it’s actually from Les Fleurs du Mal, so not only is my Arts degree as useless as everyone said it would be but obviously Baudelaire’s chef d’oeuvre had slipped in one ear and out the next without encountering any resistance in between.
Anyway, having now smelled Luxe, Calme, Volupté by Francesca Bianchi, I’m relatively confident that it’s named not for anything from the poem but for the Matisse painting that takes one of its lines for its name. If you can’t be bothered to look the painting up, just know that it features several supine female figures in beside a river, painted in a style that would later become known as fauvism – daubs of unnatural colours laid down in dots and dashes that makes the figures appear almost normal (representative of real figures) from afar but disjointed and unrecognizable up close.
The perfume resembles the painting a bit in that it’s a very effective mixture of the soft and the harsh, or maybe more accurately, the fine and the gaudy. I feel like it’s obligatory, when reviewing a Francesca Bianchi fragrance, to mention the animalic, mica-dry iris accord that runs through her work like a recessive gene. But I’m thinking now that that’s an over simplification of what she actually does. Because what really strikes me about Luxe, Calme, Volupté is its balancing act between the slutty gaudiness of tropical fruit-and-ylang notes and the stern ashiness of the galbanum. It must have been a tough one to get right.
At first, it smells bitter and dusty, the galbanum and iris drawing a brief Heure Exquise-shaped hole in the air, but shot through with a neon orange ribbon of something luridly fruity, almost overblown, like a papaya or passionfruit. Galbanum, when it has shaken off all its wet, green bitterness, withers to a nubbin of ash. So Luxe, Calme, Volupté smells rather like someone spilled a can of Lilt on the ashes of a burned-out fire a week ago and it’s now living a second life as a string of fruit leather. This ashy-fruit-amber thing is something I’ve smelled before, namely in Nur by SoOud, which was later recycled into Soleil de Jeddah by SHL 777, neither of which were as half as good as this.
But here’s the fauvism of it all – from a distance of, say, a foot or two, the perfume just smells like a tropical fruit amber sliced through with sharp, rustling greenery. It’s loud, it’s effective, and most of all, it’s cohesive. Up close, however, the gaudy daubs of colour break apart into particles of ash, leather, and vetiver, too abstract for you to really say what you’re smelling apart from something intensely, intoxicatingly fragrant.
In a way, Luxe, Calme, Volupté is a mash-up of Lost in Heaven (powdery, civety flowers) and The Black Knight (tangy, mineral-rich leather) but with its parts rearranged and stuck back together with gobs of galbanum, a resin that can’t seem to decide whether it’s a cool, dewy blade of grass or a dry green leather bitch. The best is, in my opinion, yet to come, however, because it all dries down into a wierdly addictive basenote that I can only describe as bowl of creamy banana custard made by someone with a a smoker’s cough. For me, this is the best thing Francesca Bianchi has made since Under My Skin.
Source of sample: PR sample sent by Francesca Bianchi.
Cover Image: Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
