Antihéros Etat Libre d'Orange 2006

Antihéros really is a great lavender. It starts with a pungent grassy lavender, very invigorating, like the essential oil with the addition of green woods (if there is something like that) and maybe fresh cut hay. I feel this lavender instead of being the relaxing type, clears the mind and wakes the senses.

The raw lavender note morphs into something wonderful. Antihéros becomes a linear fragance then that is frankly a pleasure to wear. It is a softer lavender, keeping its aromatic, balsamic aspects, but doesnt feel as piercing as others i have smelled. Like a superfine soap. It reminds me to the opening in Dior Homme. There, the lavender overlaying the iris is very ephemeral, but in Antihéros the effect of a powdery lavender lasts all the time. I am not sure if it contains any orris, but there is a familiar polished butteriness. As for the woods, this are dusty and soft (no "radiant" aromachemicals) The key, i think, is the type of musk used for the base: clean, bordering to the laundry softener, that, believe me, is genius in here. Its neutrality is deliberate.

The sillage is moderate, but the scent is light, unintrusive and classy. I see it as a great day perfume.

Antihéros is a refined and solicitous fragance, unapologetic about its functional spirit (clean, fresh) and assertive elegance. This house surprise me with the outstanding quality of the fragances i have tried so far, and in this case proves they can make an interesting, different version of an overlooked, underestimated genre.

This is like a photorealist painting of lavender in a modern art gallery. Like a simile of it without being it. There is a clean minty camphorous note with a sweeter undertone of an almost caramellic nature. A massive dose of a soaring aldehyde, warm woods. None of the mud of real lavender. There is a really clean and cold draft going on. Like a huge empty space. Definitely minty. Something softer and mossier, greenish leafy sharp. Maybe galbanum but a mere jot. Then there is a musky softness like clean laundry, almost citrus in it's nature. Softening from lemon to bitter oranges. A creaminess about the underneath like clean freshly laundered soft sheets that have been sprayed with lavender and then ironed over with the edge of the metal iron crisping it to sharp. Yet the cotton is the best and softest Egyptian cotton.

Really very nice and bright. Quite unexpectedly so. Crispy, clean and office suitable. Not my normal like but I love it.

Yes, ELDO is trendy and hip and different. Their shop in Paris looks more like a small gallery and the saleswomen with the obligatory lip piercings could have come straight out of an independent magazine.

The lady also found the right words for Antiheroes: "Anti-Heros is kind of simple." And she didn't understate that. It's just, as Luca Turin rightly writes, simply lavender. Aha. If I wanted lavender, I would recommend Dupont Noir, but certainly not this one.

Finally, the house État Libre d'Orange has chosen a fitting name for one of its perfumes.

Antihéros first conveys to me a coumarin-like, musty sourness, malty notes with minty undertones.
This strikingly resembles the scent notes released by lavender flowers that have been stored in a container for a long time.
The protagonist of so many perfume compositions reduced to its banal, less appealing aspects?
What has been created here is not an aestheticization of a natural aroma,
but a powerful highlighting of the ordinary/ugly in the scent of lavender.
This approach and the means (flatness, rough strokes, graininess, and the mythologizing secularization of myths) fit, in my opinion, very well with the pop-art image that État Libre d'Orange wants to convey.

Ironically, the overall impression is more pronounced and rougher, one could also call these attributes masculine, than the commonly used representations of lavender in perfumes.

For me, a great pleasure.

The fragrances from Etat Libre d´Orange do not exactly enjoy the easiest reputation in the Parfumo community. And actually, after everything I’ve read about it, I would have preferred to steer clear of it.

I only came across Antihéros because I solved part of the September puzzle and won it from a nice and generous Parfumo member. OK - not exactly the whole bottle, but definitely more than a regular fragrance sample.
When I briefly sniffed it, I was almost knocked back. I did not expect such a piercing smell of industrial cleaner and clear varnish. I would have suspected that the contents had been spoiled or swapped with any other "fragrance brand" - but with ELdO, pure provocation seems to be the program. When I then wanted to drizzle a bit on my hand and accidentally dampened my tablecloth and various newspapers, the tide turned. Antihéros suddenly didn’t seem so intense anymore, but rather metallically cool and synthetically fresh. Thus, a welcome alternative to the usual summer scents…

Today was not exactly a suitable day for my endeavor, but since I fear it will soon get colder and more wintry, I poured Antihéros on the back of my hand and neck. For me, that was quite a heroic act, as the scent still initially comes across as extremely synthetic and unsexy. I hoped that everything would quickly develop for the better, but one has to wait a long time for that. Only after many, many minutes did it become more bearable and thus wearable.
There it was, that metallic cool synthetic fresh note that makes Antihéros unique. However, it really is an extremely narrow path between “terribly bad” and “not so uninteresting at all.” I perceive nothing of woods and musk - lavender is already a bit more noticeable. After two hours, the scent had settled somewhat and seemed relatively pleasant. Shortly thereafter, it had already completely evaporated.

Among people, I felt a slight unease, but after several reapplications, one could get through Wednesday unscathed. However, there were neither compliments nor insults.

But the wearer of this strange extract is by no means an anti-hero, rather brave, clueless, or stuffy…