Serge Lutens or the Fine Art of Fragrance

Serge Lutens is one-of-a-kind in the world of contemporary perfume. A multi-facetted artist, he excels at every aspect of beauty, whether it’s fine fragrance, cosmetics, hair-styling, jewelry, objets d’art, home decorating, photography or film… and let’s not forget his veneration for writing! He has an intuitive feel for what’s beautiful and right.

Practically a prodigy, in 1962, when he was barely 20, he wowed the magazine Vogue with his photos, which unveiled both a rare elegance in his models and a boldness in his images. From then on, his talent made him famous the world over, and in 1967, the House of Dior invited him to become the artistic director for a line of make-up that had yet to be invented. The collaboration stretched into a nearly 12-year chapter of his life, and led him to explore every corner of the world of color, texture and material, like a painter working with an infinite palette of gouaches and pastels.

While he was born in the north of France, it was Morocco in 1968 and Japan in 1970 that created an emotional shock and revealed his true destiny. Morocco and the sensuality of the Orient nourish his vision of original perfume, one inspired by the ancient world and its odiferous waxes and balms. He has been living in Marrakech since 1974, and all of his fragrant compositions are inspired by the wealth of materials and scents that surround him there. Ambre Sultan, Chergui, Cuir Mauresque, Musc Koublaï Khän, Tubereuse Criminelle, RahätLoukoum – his house’s classics – have been joined by the more recent Chêne, Daim Blond, Borneo 1834 and Cèdre.

Japan incarnates Serge Lutens’s other polestar, thanks to the determining encounter with the founder of the cosmetics company Shiseido, a rich, cultured patron of the arts who called upon Lutens’s skills in 1979. The renowned artist focused international attention on the Far Eastern house. In 1992, the garden of the Palais Royal in Paris, became the luxurious, jewel-box setting for Serge Lutens’s fragrances, in an intimate boutique christened Les Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido.

This spring, the salon lets you discover his latest fragrances, as well as his Nécessaire de beauté, a range of eye shadows, lipsticks and kohl that he describes as “an essential minimum, simply evoking a way of making oneself noticed, because beauty is only beautiful if it shows”.