Serge Lutens Perfume & Women's Fragrance

Serge Lutens is an iconic designer and art director who had an illustrious career with some of the beauty worlds biggest brands before starting his own company around the turn of the millennium. Interested in photography and beauty from an early age, the Frenchman moved to Paris at 20 years old where he ended up working for Vogue Magazine. He quickly became the talk of the town for the innovative and chic make-up, hair and jewellery he created. Never one to settle with just one job Lutens also kept up his photography and filmmaking and his impressionistic photos were displayed far and wide, including in the famous Guggenheim Museum in New York.

It was during his tenure at Shiseido he was offered to design his first fragrance. Unlike many designers, Serge Lutens takes an active and executive part in the creation of all his perfumes and the debut, Nombre Noir (1982), ended up becoming the first of many and the beginning of a whole new career for Lutens.

All Serge Lutens fragrances are unisex, meant to be enjoyed and worn by anyone. Since 2000, all Lutens fragrances have been issued in the same elegantly iconic rectangular bottles, featuring a simple label with the name of the fragrance and very little in terms of visual representation of the scent. Instead, only the colour of the juice inside and the name reveals what it holds in store.

After establishing his own label in the new millenium, after a decade of developing unusual luxury scents at the exclusive Les Salons du Palais Royal in Paris, Lutens has released a steady stream of unforgettable fragrances. As a perfumer he favours quality ingredients and narrative, building a scene or character with the progression of notes. A good example of Lutens storytelling style is the oriental Ambre Sultan (2000), which sketches a bedouin tent in a desert with notes of burning incense, spices and deep, dark resins, or Muscs Koublai Khan (1998) which paints a portrait of the feared Mongol warlord Koublai Khan with large amounts of animal musks and civet, which makes for an primal beast of a fragrance that should definitely not be worn for work! A sweeter standout from Lutens production is the lovely Bas de Soie (2010), which means “silk stockings” and represents this with powdered iris and soothing hyacinth.