Baudelaire Byredo 2009

Anyone reading Baudelaire on a bottle expects a fragrance that harbors an immense, tearing tension between light and dark. Here, the ugly, dark, tragic, and morbid dominate, ultimately triumphing over the light, beautiful, and lively. Although this is repeatedly interrupted by brief moments of brightness and radiance, which the person drowning in the raging storm believes to perceive from the nearby lighthouse or some blue patches in the sky.

Charles Baudelaire was a failed, unloved, unhappy, and depressed person in life. Throughout his life, he was tormented by feelings of inferiority, financial problems, and venereal diseases. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du Mal, is marked by deep pessimism, overwhelming darkness, great disillusionment, fragile structure, and omnipresent ugliness. The world around 1840 to 1860 appears to him entirely gloomy, paralyzingly melancholic, hopelessly morbid, and broken. People live-or rather vegetate-torn between the good, the light, and the often prevailing evil, the dark. They often tragically fail at life.

The top note of Baudelaire paints a picture of impending doom with bold strokes. An imminent catastrophic storm. A flood in which immense, all-consuming forces of nature unleash their tremendous fury. After spraying Baudelaire, aromatic notes dominate. Mild spicy caraway, black pepper, and herbal, smoky to leathery juniper.

And then, as ominously announced, the sky opens, and hell, indistinguishable from one another, reveals its dark, hissing maw. The calamity crashes down with tremendous force upon the defenseless land. In the form of dark hyacinth, leafy notes, dark leather, and smoky, dry incense that darkens to the base.

Even though the ominous wall of clouds could collapse at any moment and obliterate all living things forever, the oppressive threat of the fearsome wall of the darkest and most powerful clouds remains always stronger and more menacing than the raging storm itself.

Now and then, flashes of light from a solitary flickering lighthouse can be discerned on the distant mainland. One imagines catching a glimpse of a timid piece of sky, which is immediately swallowed again by monstrous black clouds.

True hope sprouts in the storm. Time and again, it is crushed in the roar of the overpowering tempest. A hovering between life and death, where death repeatedly claims its prey to devour it.

The immense wall of clouds slowly pulls back a bit. The darkest clouds gradually give way to dark gray ones. A note can be discerned that resembles broken, sour reeds lying gray and miserable on the foggy and earthy ground after an autumn storm.

From now on, patchouli determines the course of the fragrance. Moist, woody, earthy, sweet. Some souls have been swept away by the storm and the icy waves. Their corpses slowly rot on the wet, earthy shore. Together with some shattered wooden planks. Earth and reeds gradually overgrow their bodies, erasing the memory of the deceased.

Referring to Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal," the fragrance journey should end here. However, at Byredo, the scent story continues. After a few hours, amber emerges, still dark as night, but hopeful, woody, dry, sweet, and somewhat tobacco-like.

Some people have been swept away by the floods of the storm. But not in paralyzing resignation, rather in a deadly serious, yet not hopeless struggle between the dark and the light.

The dark could not sweep away everything human. Even if the bright, silver sparkling on the horizon is not yet visible, the calamity recedes. It does not become bright, but night falls. A calm, dry, warm night that does not let the hope of experiencing the next day die.