The new Moulin Rouge 1889 by Histoires de Parfums is named after the famous Parisian cabaret, the birth place of French Can Can, and the date of its establishment. 1889 is also in the history of Western perfumery the year of birth of Jicky by Guerlain considered to be the first full-fledged modern fragrance composition.
The Eau de Parfum signed by Gérald Ghislain was commissioned to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the cabaret and was launched together with an inaugural line of Moulin-Rouge accessories for the body and home which also includes jewelry, feather lamps, shoes. The scent is inspired by the atmosphere of the dance-hall today but also reportedly by the figure of painter Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) who immortalized the 19th century honk-a-tonk and its dancers. Rather than devote attention to the historical context here, I will focus on the somewhat elusive, hard-to-pin-down quality of the perfume, a refreshing departure in an universe encumbered by copy-cat perfumes and overly cautious launches.
Around Moulin Rouge 1889: Impressions, Scent Notes, Stories: A Demonstration of Its Ineffability?
I can imagine a coterie of people linked by a creed in a common body of convictions whose central tenet would be that the best perfumes are recognizable due to their ineffable quality. If you cannot talk about them or if you fail to present a coherent, one-piece story of the scent, then it means that this perfume is stronger than words, that it is really what it is supposed to be: its own language, perfume.
This is to some extent the problem I am encountering with Moulin Rouge 1889 by Histoires de Parfums....
The latest work for l'Artisan Parfumeur by Bertrand Duchaufour, Al Oudh,
is an attempt it seems to capture the authentic, traditional
personality of oud or agarwood (some of its other names are listed
here) while taming it in advance in the bottle for those who might be
weary of the power of the material or not know how to apply it with
the discretion required. At the same time this may just be a handy rationalization
to review a low-intensity oud, a condition to which the material is de
facto, it might be argued, forced by its price. It is however the combination of sotto voce and sustained qualities here that made my perception of the scent turn into a more positive one.
There is some
discrepancy between the brand's promise of a "dense" oud perfume and
the more attenuated quality of Al Oudh even more on paper than on skin. The rich list of notes made you anticipate a perfume nearly as thick and deep as a night in the desert with
ingredients such as date, leather, castoreum, civet, myrrh (please see full list of notes at the end of the article). You
anticipated a flight of fancy taken via the orientalist genre by perfumer
Bertrand Duchaufour. But what strikes you initially is that Al Oudh betrays a conventional bon-ton, dry, woodsy, urban, niche perfumery feel
familiar to those who wear Comme de Garçons fragrances, which makes it
feel overly coded at first; Duchaufour has in fact composed several perfumes for Comme des Garçons. It makes you suspect that oudh was
kidnapped in order to reinforce this standard-issue edgy accord and make it a
little bit more daring (insert tremolos). You think of Al Oudh as a
"hipster oud" at first.
After letting the note express itself
from beginning till the end and getting a fuller sense of the
personality of the perfume overtime, I now see it more as an accomplishment to
have managed to preserve the personality of oud intact over so many
long hours of development. Compared to other oud perfumes, it seems
that Al Oudh by L'Artisan Parfumeur claims to be both authentic-smelling and easy to wear.
The composition is not very expansive, but at the same time its
sustained quality is well-controlled and modulated coming across in the end as
remarkable.
If we take the analogy of Aesop's fable "The Tortoise and The Hare", this would be a tortoise-oud with the twist that oud is
fundamentally and by nature a stealthy black panther turned here into a slow, tenacious tortoise endowed with a focused sense of finish thanks to the
perfumer. It's here at the start and it's there at the end when other oud compositions have fallen by the wayside after offering their fireworks. This slow-burn movement is what makes it special...
With Jasmine White Moss, Estee Lauder launched their third and last chapter of the Private Collection creations last summer following Tuberose Gardenia and Amber Ylang. The collection is dedicated to the memory of founder Estée by Aerin Lauder her grand-daughter and senior vice president and creative director of Estée Lauder. The latest launch is the one most directly connected to the spirit of the founder of the brand as it reprises a formula - Formula 546AQ - which was first developed under her aegis in the late 80s and then set aside. The idea however of introducing a chypré green perfume was not abandoned for all that.
Around the same time, Mrs. Estée Lauder was apparently interested in paying tribute to the decade's taste for green chypres (Niki de Saint Phalle, La Nuit de Paco Rabanne, Jean-Louis Sherrer...) but preferred to launch another composition belonging to that family, Knowing, which is still in existence today. The brand itself had given personal impetus to that category of scents with Alliage (1972) and Private Collection (1973).
The 2009 Jasmine White Moss is reportedly an "updated" formulation of the original by perfumer Jean-Marc Chaillan of IFF due to regulatory restrictions on raw materials. No doubt also that aside from these restrictions, changes would have had had to take place due to evolutions in consumers' tastes. Chaillan is also the author of Baldessarini, Provocative Woman, Burberry London, Avon Spotlight, CKIN2U and more, all destined to the wider public.
The most obvious new contemporary trait in the perfume is the replacement of traditional oakmoss with a proprietary White Moss Mist ingredient. Other contemporary nuances seem to be a sweeter white vanilla nuance than is more typical of the era in which we live and a fresh living flower quality to the floral facet.
What remain signs of classicism is a structure resting on a slow-motion development in the Eau de Parfum concentration, a discreet civet note in the EDP also and the green chypre affiliation evocative for its green accent of Private Collection by Estée Lauder and Silences by Jacomo (1978)...
Perfumery is normally not an art form which concentrates on difficult internal visions, desolate landscapes and stark portraiture of humanity - I am thinking for reference of the series on peasants eating potatotes by Vincent Van Gogh - but is communicative, amiable and wishes to please and seduce. Its not-so-secret hope is to become part of the intimate lives of millions of women if possible then follow suit with their daughters and grand-daughters ideally and therefore courtship is in order. Perfumery loves women and wants to be loved in return.
In Lalique Encre Noire pour Elle (lit. Black Ink for Her) this instinct is magnified and made more systematically evident in the showcasing of a floral bouquet in its heart which collapses three families of florals together. Abandoning the purist's stance, perfumer Christine Nagel seems to have wanted Encre Noire pour Elle to be as much as possible everything to every women by appealing to three main ideal floral types: the fruity-floral lover will appreciate the apricot-y nuances of osmanthus; the classic rose lover will find comfort in a cuddly rose-vanilla accord; the white floral lover will find whiffs of a classic white bouquet scent coloring the composition. Even the woodsy-floral and clean-musky-floral girls will find something in the scent for them.
This hodge-podge of inspirations instead of making the composition feel as if it were confused, crowded and desperate for approval weaves the three main floral personalities in a clever way. Encre Noire pour Elle, riding on the wave of olfactory oecumenism, even manages to balance out known Eastern and Western olfactory preferences by balancing out transparency and depth with a deft hand...
Perfume cognoscenti will be able to remember the year 2009 as the time when the
slightly retro-flavored barbershop-originated British house of Penhaligon's took a blatantly new
direction with the launch of five unexpected perfumes created by nose Bertrand Duchaufour. Before that, Penhaligon's
perfumes were far from being devoid of character or interest. See for instance
the masculine rose soliflore edged with sulfur that is Hammam Bouquet. The
house also makes no mystery of appreciating contemporary perfumers with
avant-gardist sensibilities. Take for example Olivia Giacobetti's hiring to
rework the variation Elixir Hammam Bouquet, whose own brand of perfume IUNX is
sleekly modernist. In 2008, the Love Potion No9 perfumes were relaunched and
Elixir introduced. This is when things started changing.
What appears different this year is the fact that perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour
was officially advertized and apparently given carte blanche to create in his
own style of perfumery rather than by following any beaten track marked by the stampede of
the elephant herd, the vast commercial market. This is not to look down the
nose at the commercial market and float the idea that designer and mass-market
fragrances cannot be good. There are gems everywhere, there are unfinished drafts
everywhere. Designer perfumes are in fact often more defining than niche
fragrances.
Behind the Penhaligon's Victorian mask of propriety, their perfume names seemingly
borrowed from The Language of Flowers or the dog-eared pages of an old house
recipe book that Septimus Piesse could have held in his hands at one time
- Extract of Limes, Eau de Verveine, Gardenia, Night Scented Stock, Amaranthine
- Penhaligon's has quietly but surely reconceptualized their perfumes thanks to their intelligent approach. This
discreet revolution has taken place inside the bottle. In this manner, we are
witnessing the reverse process of what takes places frequently in the larger
market: bottles change to signal change, the juice stays the same to cater to the
conservative side of the nose. The wider market thus repeatedly proclaims its
lack of confidence in its potential customers confessing that they do not have
enough educated noses to discern the differences in perfume notes, yet always
feel confident that the latest in design packaging will have the desired
impact....
Helena Rubinstein Wanted was first launched in August 09 in Paris at the Printemps and on November 5 in the US. I thought, walking into the department store back in the summer, that it was worthy of a bottle purchase for a blog review, then got a richly illustrated press release, then left on a holiday, then smelled a string of milky fruity-florals in between now and then.
I feel at this point as if it requires a certain amount of discipline, even stoicism, not to falter at the mere thought of having to review one more milky-floral (I am channeling the Stoics here). It is unfair to Wanted, because my initial impressions of it were fresher (it's a good thing I jotted down my impressions then).
Fortunately, I have been used in my past to doing tedious, repetitive and necessary systematic gathering of anthropological data and this is no different in a sense. So I try to remember how exciting it felt to ask the same questions for the umptieth time because I was getting closer to the bigger picture. But that was when I was interested in detecting patterns and regularities. With perfume, it still remains interesting and even necessary for me to look at it from a social perspective -- I have been doing that from the start of my blogging days -- but since there is nevertheless this floating idea that creativity is expected and even encouraged, it feels at times downright grueling.
Are You Wearing a Cherubato, a Lactone, a Milky, an Angel Milk, also called in French a Lait d'Ange ?
Having said that, one has to temporarily conclude that the milky fruity-floral has become a genre in and of itself, like chypre is. We can be playful and propose names for it: a cherubato (cherub + rubato), a milky, an angel milk. I cannot imagine that with the number of, nay, the onslaught of releases in this category, it could be considered just as an accident of taste.
One of the early, isolated then milky perfumes was Yin by Jacques Fath (1997) created by perfumer Anne Flipo....
The perfume starts with a subtle, surface powdery impression soon followed by a beautiful both intense and understated aldehydic white floral bouquet like a cleaner but no less feminine Joy by Patou. It is a Joy Americanized, made easier to wrap your mind around, offering the clarity of lines of a beautiful race automobile.
The impression of Joy came to me before I went to check some background information about the scent. Josie Natori said that growing up she was used to reveling in rich perfumes: Joy by Patou that her grand-mother wore, as well as Bal à Versailles by Jean Desprez, both which can be described as old-school French perfumes.
This is just the introduction as it turns out. While you were checking the box next to the word "linear" in your mind as one more sign of Americanization in the jus, the fragrance starts to slowly fade into a deeper, darker and fruitier atmosphere reminiscent of the oriental base with myrrh in Gianni Versace (1981) which has aldehydic, fruity, and chypre facets as well...
When Futur by Robert Piguet was originally launched ca.1967 (based on the year of publication of a magazine ad that states it being "nouveau", i.e., new), couturier Robert Piguet (1891-1953) had been dearly departed for 14 years and the couture house had closed its doors for an even longer period of time 16 years earlier due to the frail constitution of the couturier.
It is not easy to come by information about Futur which seems to have benefited little from the large and numerous publicity campaigns lavished on the great Piguet classics, Bandit, Fracas, even Visa, Dingo and Baghari, nor to have been worn long enough to leave an imprint in the literary cannon. From the day of its conception, and like a baby begotten out of frozen sperm if I may, it could come across as not quite fashionably or authentically Piguet.
Smelling the recreated perfume of 2009 which is reportedly close to the original formula according to the perfumer Aurélien Guichard himself (I cannot confirm nor contradict his claim at this point), one is invited to go back in time due to both its retro signature and anachronistic feel.
To me, Futur ca. 2009 smells like a hybrid of influences, just like it seems it was already at the time of its conception in 1967. This is to say that Futur already in the 1960s was meant to be a compromise turned towards the past although its name and the advert on which it was touted (see above) seem to point to the same future as pointed to by Stanley Kubrick's Space Odissey (1968). The closely cropped hairdo for a woman, the enormous water drop earring are here because it was the age of space attraction and Mod flair on its way to New Age. Twiggy was a feminine ideal then and so the model resembles her.
Pierre Cardin in Canberra in 1967
Courrèges
Even though Piguet could not try beyond his grave to emulate Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges's astronaut-inspired outfits, Futur in order to make sense to a young audience in 1967 needed to borrow from the signs that felt relevant and especially, current, or as Cardin expressed on behalf of humanity,
'The clothes that I prefer are those I invent for a life that doesn't exist yet - the world of tomorrow'.
That was a bit of a complicated riddle to try to capture the DNA of Robert Piguet, as they would say today in marketing speak, while appealing to an audience that was fascinated by prospects of life on a foreign planet.
We are thus faced with a perfume that was never actually launched by Robert Piguet himself, but which bears his name and which was introduced when futurism was the by-word, a worldview that was foreign to the fashion of Robert Piguet. The conflation of both betrays the commercialism of the project. Smelling the perfume ca. 2009 is to discover a supplementary level of contradiction as it does not smell so much like the green perfumes of the 1960s which indeed became in vogue as more like a throwback to the 1940s-1950s with its affinities to the heaving bosom of the green leathery chypre Miss Dior or the Joy-like bouquet of White Shoulders (at the lesser grade found in the parfum, not full-blown like in the eau de cologne), but also thanks to discreet allusions to fetishistic Piguet notes like galbanum, leather (Bandit) and tuberose (Fracas).
Here is a Timeline of some representative Green Perfumes from the 1960s-early 1970s:
Futur is heavier than those except for Azurée perhaps and was built with the intent to make a big impact.
Notes in Futur such as galbanum, hyacinth, narcissus, and daffodil are very 60s but the volume of the scent, its leathery animalic base are more from the 50s. It smells to put it more synthetically like the 60s-as-the-long-1950s or the conservative side of the decade, advertising notwithstanding...
L'Humaniste is the latest perfume by Parfums Frapin, the perfumery branch of Cognac Frapin. For more background information you can go here as we already reviewed several of their perfumes which are all inspired by a love of wine country and the different facets of wines.
L'Humaniste is a reference in name and composition to Renaissance writer François Rabelais (ca. 1493- 1553) who is an ancestor of the Frapins. He is the son of one Antoine de Rabelais and one Anne Catherine Frapin. The perfume, created by perfumer Sidonie Lancesseur of Robertet, was issued to follow up on the celebration of the 500th anniversary of François Rabelais. Associated with this gesture, Frapin have also launched a luxurious limited edition Cognac bottle called Baccarat Rabelais (see picture on the left) which was presented this year to wine collectors also in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the technique and expression termed La part des anges (lit. the angels' share). As we know, it has now been borrowed as an adapted technique by Thierry Mugler to felicitously, in my opinion, apply to perfume-making and Angel in particular.
The grape harvest just took place in Paris in Montmartre like each year. Grape harvest news have been broadcast since August in France. Wine is one of the jewels of French culture (and exports) and it is therefore always, somehow, interesting to know how wine is doing, will be doing and what people can expect to see poured in their glasses at an ulterior date. To paraphrase Stendhal, like beauty, wine seems to be a promise of happiness in France. The news from the Bordeaux country are excellent (they tend to be always great hence the difficulty to sort out facts per the cited source). But according to Le Monde.fr, Saint-Emilion maker Hubert de Boüar exclaimed with particular enthusiasm this year that,
"J'ai un jeune labrador. C'est la première fois que je le vois croquer à pleine dent dans une grappe de merlot !"
"I have a young Labrador. It is the first time that I see it eagerly bite into a bunch of Merlot!
Wine is in the air and in two new perfume this fall, the other one being Angel Liqueur, which I already mentioned in an earlier post.
Havana Vanille is the new, upcoming perfume by L'Artisan Parfumeur, part of their travel series. This time, coming after Fleur de Liane and Panama, the very atmospheric capital city of Cuba is the reported source of inspiration while the composition centers on a Mexican vanilla absolute.
"From its vibrant Salsa rhythm, its famous cigars and its famous Cuban rum, its palaces and colonial houses with their old and sometimes broken down facades to its extraordinary religious buildings like the Santa Clara Convent: from its streets with those old American cars from the 50s to its beautiful long beaches like Bacuranao, Boca Ciega, Guanabo, Mégano or Santa María...
A world of contrast. "
Havana Vanille is at first blush a musky vanilla with aspects of sweet honeyed and wet leather, creamy vanilla cupcake undertone and some powdery musk-amber with hints of coffee, green anise, immortelle, caramel all made a bit boozy thanks to a realistic shot of rum. The composition has a creamy-liquorish-y facet that translate a bit as Kahlua and Bayley's liqueurs. An earthy yet understated patchouli in the base gives it an interesting kick, one, I would have wished, were more characteristic. Instead the focus seems to be largely on amber and even more so, on musk....
If I had
stayed with my first impression of the perfume upon smelling it casually in a
department store, I would have had to write that the new Guerlain Idylle is
incomprehensibly devoid in creativity, originality and personality.
A superficial take on it will make you believe initially that this composition
is yet another variation -- barely -- on the tried-and-tested
musk-rose-patchouli standard ensconced in the young and foolish (in a good way)
neo-chypres that have been put out since Narciso Rodriguez for Her EDT. It was
then closely followed by Sarah Jessica Parker Lovely which managed to fly under
the radar of copycatting and pass as an endearing novelty thanks in part to
SJP's lovely pink tulle dress. Later, it was succeeded by the noteworthy Gucci
by Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent Elle and Dior Midnight Poison. Caresse by
Fragonard is also a take on this accord. It is these days the ever-popular
accord, that is, if you pay attention, and has become one of the significant
olfactory signatures of the times. What will one day bring tears of nostalgia
to the eyes of the future generations because it smelled so much like the end
of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, for now can make you grind
your teeth at so much unoriginality when encountered one time too many.
My initial reaction to Idylle was disbelief: I just felt like throwing my arms
up in the air and shaking my head at so much ineptitude. Really, for one of
their major mainstream launches couldn't the house of Guerlain do better than
this? This, to just reheat the Narciso Rodriguez for Her brew courtesy of
Francis Kurkdjian, Christine Nagel and the majority's approval on a gas burner
and serve it as if piping hot in a new vessel?
Incidentally, the flacon by Ora Ito is more beautiful in person than on any of
the pictures I have seen. It is a much more subtle form in reality.
I was apparently able in some vexing way to perceive only the shell of the
perfume rather than its internal nuances. Retrospectively, it feels a little as
if the real story of the perfume was taking place inside a snow globe and I was
only able to feel the outer surface. Even on the street, the sillage continued
to murmur to me all the sweet expected nothings from a rosy young chypre
desperate to follow the trend rather than set it.
Idylle"
means love, or the dream of love. The word refers to a poetic genre which in
Greek antiquity sang of the amours and erotic encounters of a shepherd boy and
girl in a bucolic setting. An idyll is also a song of innocence lost, expressing
feelings such as the fear of seeing beauty vanish and youth fly by all too
quickly.
As
the poet Theocrites penned in one of his idylls, "Soon your youth will fade away like a dream," thereby inviting
the young shepherd girl to experience love before it is too late.
Perfumer
Thierry Wasser, who created Idylle, explained that in keeping with the Guerlain
family tradition of seeking inspiration in love to compose their fragrances, he
had wanted to pay homage to this long line of spiritual forefathers. The word
"youthful" also appears as
a key term in his presentation published on the dedicated Guerlain website. The
notion of youth befits the idyll genre and the stylistic choice made here: a
crisp, young yet antique rose tinged with green, which offers a millefleurs aspect like a floral
tapestry (in the sense of a composition incorporating several distilled
flowers.) But the approach is also more externally motivated by the house's desire
to create an affective link with the younger generations of women, the
customers who will ensure Guerlain's prosperity into the 21st
century....
Forever by Mariah Carey is the newest fragrance release by the pop singer who is also preparing to launch a new album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel on September 29, 2009. You will also be able to see her in Lee Daniels's movie Precious based on the novel Push by Sapphire this November. In it she appears virtually without makeup and unadorned to play her role as a caring and frumpy social worker.
As the artist already stated when her second fragrance Luscious Pink was launched and in what sounds like a leitmotiv that she likes to rehash, Forever, like Luscious Pink "...reflects where I am in my life now." This appears to be her most natural and no-brainer way to relate to perfume as well as a non-too committal existential quote. No need to bring up aesthetics or anything really complicated like that but what it is saying in the end is that personal meaning is too complicated to be adequately explained. The mystery of Carey's personality and her perfume can thus be equally preserved except that the name Forever seems to allude to her marriage to Nick Cannon as well as her relationship with her fans.
From her debut fragrance M to the extrait version M Gold, to Luscious Pink and now Forever, Mariah Carey's perfumes like her ballads seemingly deliver pages torn out from her diary, or yours for that matter. It is a minimally honest proposition for this type of perfumery creation. One of the critiques plaguing the genre or marketing category -- some will prefer to say -- of the celebrity perfume is that they are sheer mercantile Trojan horses without any soul to them nor a drop actually of the personality of the celeb that gave her or his name to a perfume.
The initial M however was built around some of her favorite smells, like the meeting of roasted marshmallows and sea air and incense from Morocco. Who would want to blend that if not for her? Carey's perfumes target her fans and she does not seem to be shy about letting out some particles of her intimate memories through the evocation of collaged impressions from the past...
Klubwasser by WienerBlut is said to be an evocation of turn-of-the-century Vienna (see also Q & A with founder Alexander Lauber)
but it could be just as well an evocation of a long-forgotten yet
familiar scent that once wafted throughout many European cities in that
period. It is a nostalgic, old-school -- I am tempted to say even
extinct type of fougère -- with a very accentuated coumarin/blond hay
facet pushed to an extent that is not seen today. It marks Klubwasser
as offering an outmoded and revivalist flavor. The fragrance was
composed by Viennese perfumer Yogesh Kumar, a specialist of "emotional communication" as expressed through olfaction.
One is struck here by a frozen-mammoth aspect as if archeologists instead of digging back to light a well-preserved mammoth from the Siberian permafrost or frozen mud complete with the grass and seeds it was eating at the time of death, had uncovered a first-generation fougère in its original state smelling of plants and "fougère" in particular in a much more literalist manner than one might have suspected in the 20th and 21st centuries used to complex constructions around the basic accord. Suddenly one realizes that perhaps the original fougère scent had something of a soliflore showcasing the brand new and exciting blonde-hay note. When perfumer Paul Parquet used the synthetic coumarin for the first time in Fougère Royale by Houbigant introduced in 1882, one could imagine that it smelled very much like the subsequent Klubwasser for this idea of the scent of a fougère royale or Osmunda Regalis L. But Klubwasser is also a reenactment of a "bouquet for the handkerchief" and apart from its insertion in the fougère tradition seems to reproduce as well the aesthetics of olfactory elegance of a time when violet was all the rage, and scents had an even more ephemeral quality due to the use of mostly natural ingredients. The illusion of a photo from the past haloed with poetry is here. The radical historic character is so marked that Klubwasser ends up feeling like a scent from a sci-fi novel...
Opening a flacon of a new perfume by French artist and aesthete Serge Lutens always holds the promise of standing as another worthy episode in the olfactory adventure that he has been able to create since his debut scent Nombre Noir in 1982. No one is expected more than him, in collaboration with Christopher Sheldrake, to deliver a piece of bravura and make perfume paradigms shift. No one is also more spoken out against.
Of all the fragrance artists that practice in the contemporary period that is, those persons that choose to express themselves through the art of perfumery by appealing to our thinking and feeling nose, Lutens is probably the one most attuned to the mind-teasing dimension of fragrances. By design or simply because he cannot help it, his perfumes are psychological objects. With Lutens, you are not following the evolution and application of the theoretical tenets of a school of perfumery but rather you are following the expansion and reaffirmation of a personal universe of thoughts and sensations.
In Fille en Aiguilles, I see a new unexpected didactic dimension emerging in the style of the teachings of a wise old monk using a wooden stick to awaken us from our lazy slumbers. He will not say anything very precise, but he is seemingly sticking a branch of pine in the smalls of our backs to prevent us from thinking that we are awake. The perfume seems to say in not-so-subtle a fashion: this is strong medicine and if you find it too potent for you, then leave me alone, go see elsewhere. The single-mindedness of the evergreen accord in this pine-centering scent, its ruffling-of-the-feathers quality is a reminder of a tradition of eye-opening, mind-enlightening -- and with Fille en Aiguilles -- mind-and-nose-clearing practices carried on by sages in ancient tales. Terebenthine has been extracted from pinus maritima L for ages to cure blocked noses and airways. In perfumery a blocked nose could be the sign of a blocked mind. By highlighting this note in this manner (this is no Brut), Lutens is also going back to an archaic tradition of perfumery little different from medicine while adding a philosophical bent more than a religious one...
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Perfumery is normally not an art form which concentrates on difficult internal visions, desolate landscapes and stark portraiture of humanity - I am thinking for reference of the series on peasants eating potatotes by Vincent Van Gogh - but is communicative, amiable and wishes to please and seduce. Its not-so-secret hope is to become part of the intimate lives of millions of women if possible then follow suit with their daughters and grand-daughters ideally and therefore courtship is in order. Perfumery loves women and wants to be loved in return. 
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