Dent de lait, the fragrance that awakens memories
Serge Lutens’ latest opus is a new chapter in his perfume biography. It’s about that special passage from childhood to adolescence. An addictive fragrance that smells as sweet as childhood memories. – Isabelle Cerboneschi
Perfume designer Serge Lutens always accompanies the fragrances he creates with words, a short story that gives an insight into the fragrance. But what did he want to tell with his latest opus, Dent de Lait? It’s about a child who loses a baby tooth, and with it a little of his innocence. It’s also about a thread, but do we always need to follow the course of the story he’s telling us?
Serge Lutens never reveals anything about the formulation of the fragrances that bear his name. He’s right, after all: do you ask a composer how many A’s, B’s or E’s he chose to write his music? On the other hand, there’s nothing to stop us looking at the composition on the back of the packaging. And there, among the various molecules, we find eugenol, a component of the clove from which it is generally extracted. It makes me smile: Serge Lutens has thought of a cure for toothache. In this fragrance, there is both the pain of loss and the means to alleviate it. It’s subtle.
Serge Lutens’ fragrances are like chapters in his own autobiography, an olfactory autobiography. It’s up to us to find our way through this forest of symbols, these enigmas locked away in bottles, to trace the author of these fragrant lines.
But what’s more important, in the end: to know the original intention behind the creation of a fragrance, or to question our own history to understand why we chose this fragrance from among the hundreds of others on the market? Why did you decide to make it your own, to wear it on your skin, in one of the most intimate gesture?
A fragrance is a memory ‘awakener’, a beautiful artifice that jars our neurons and puts us back in a situation we’ve already experienced. It calls up our earliest memories: before seeing, a baby smells.
Dent de lait speaks to me of a bygone era, it tells me of the evening kiss with its sweet smell in which I discern a note of rose and violet, like the rice powders grandmothers used to wear when their hair was purple.
Dent de lait brings back memories of loved ones who are no longer with us. This fragrance recounts the tender, infinite love of a child for her grandmother and of a grandmother for her child. It’s a breath of tenderness, a reminiscence of a rainy day lulled by the throbbing sound of a sewing machine. A child’s idea of happiness.
Dent de lait is as comforting as a rolled cake with raspberry jam just out of the oven. Hardly surprising, in fact: in perfumery, rose, raspberry and lychee have notes in common.
Dent de lait is like going on a swing, falling off your bike and losing two wheels, a tooth and your pride.
Dent de lait could well be the fragrance of paradise lost…
