Bourreau des Fleurs Serge Lutens 2017

For this comment, I will use a text written by Serge Lutens himself as a foundation and explanation. It is titled "Monde arabe" and can be found in the book "Les Parfumeurs: Dans l'intimité de grands créateurs de parfum" (Harper-Collins, 2018).
Since there is unfortunately no German translation available yet, I will do the job myself. I will refrain from using the original quotes in French (except for the conclusion) as this would make the comment unnecessarily cumbersome. Anyone who understands French and is interested in perfume should get the aforementioned book. It is a fantastic source of firsthand information. For in this work, it is not a blogger who is rambling or a perfume critic who is speculating, but the perfumer themselves who speaks.

I do not know which facts from Lutens' life are already known to you, so forgive me if I bore you with some biographical information that was new to me personally. For I did not actually know that Lutens grew up in Lille in northern France and made his first experiences in the world of cosmetics in a hair salon, where he picked up and swept hairpins from the floor. How he then came to Dior in 1968 as a makeup developer from Lille is not revealed in his text. In 1980, he switched to Shiseido as a stylist and makeup director. There, he designed bottles, and later he was sent to Firmenich for further training, where he received a perfumery education that still enables him to create perfumes today. In the 90s, there were tensions between Shiseido and Lutens. He left the company.
In 2000, he opened his own perfume house, the Palais-Royal in Paris.

"Today we count 80 different scents in our collection, most of which, but not all, were developed by me together with Christopher Sheldrake, with whom I collaborate at every single stage of production... sometimes for years. For example, we took 12 years for 'Chene'." (p. 135)

How long Sheldrake and Lutens worked on "Bourreau des Fleurs," I do not know.
The pyramid initially suggests a simple scent. Only three ingredients are mentioned.
Good! I like it when perfume houses refrain from presenting extensive information about the ingredients, because that way we, the critics (whether professionals or hobby critics like me), cannot just work through and repeat the pyramid, but must orient our texts differently.

"Bourreau des Fleurs" is a multifaceted, spicy scent that leads back to the roots, which Lutens himself describes as "an imaginary landscape in which he spins in circles." At the center of his work is the engagement with "the woman" par excellence:
"All these women are the woman, my invented woman, magical, with magical powers. One might think that my imaginary landscape spins in circles. I take revenge on contempt. I take revenge on women. I take revenge on the woman herself. My life is a story of revenge. I am the mistake. I make it up and I worsen it. For one cannot make up for anything without worsening it. I love, I seduce, and at the same time, I hate and destroy. Without this violence, there is no creation." (p. 130)

In "BdF," one initially senses an almost magical herbal witch aura, a brew of various spices that one already knows from other creations of the Lutens/Sheldrake duo.
A hint of "Ambre Sultan" flashes through, a small piece of Marrakech, a place that holds great significance for Lutens, as his ethnic roots lie there, even though he grew up in Lille.

"When I discovered Morocco, I knew that the Arab world had not yet been accepted by French society. Hence my choice. To return. To stay.
I was in permanent contradiction to French society, and the violence of this new world that I discovered suited me. And I have not changed. I am still in contradiction. So I am still here. This justifies my loneliness, first in Paris, then here, in Marrakech." (p. 132)

The licorice herbal spice drink gives way in the heart to a note that I personally usually find problematic in perfumes, but which appears to be masterfully processed in "BdF." It is the straw flower.
"If you manage to overcome your initial disgust, then it becomes very interesting. Disgust plays a large role in my way of conceiving the story of a scent. Disgust and words." (p. 131)
"A perfume is not a single smell, it is not a vanilla cake, it is a whole cosmos. That is already literature!"

Just as one sees a literary text, Lutens also views perfume as a fundamental means of artistic expression.
"My intention is to touch people. If perfumery did not touch anyone, it would be completely uninteresting." (p. 136)

"I am not interested in happiness. When I open a book about happiness, I close it very quickly again. It bores me. Happiness does not interest me. What interests me is the process of creation. To create something." (p. 137).

The straw flower is called "Immortelle" in French, meaning the immortal. It possibly points to Lutens' mother, whose first name was Fleurisse. For him, the mother remains a person he could never grasp.
"The psychoanalysts... they have all gone crazy because I cannot get well. It is impossible. I need this image of a woman who initially replaced my mother... without a woman, I perish."
Perhaps that is why the straw flower seems so soft and comforting to me, so fitting in "BdF."
But in the end, it weakens, giving way to a slight kitchen smell that does not remind me of charred wood, but of an oriental stew with herbs.
The flowers, in my perception, were not trampled or broken (as the name suggests), but slowly cooked down.

"I need this permanent image of a woman, and I reinvent it with every perfume and with every name I choose. The names of the perfumes from my house continue a dialogue with this woman... Death is very present in our conversation, but it never has a sad aspect."

Lutens ends his text with a poem, which I quote in the original French text:

La mort, c'est gai, la mort,
c'est aussi une femme.
Une femme qui vient me dire bonjour.
Elle est tres élégante.
Elle est immortelle.
Elle a de beaux jours devant elle.

And now a discussion from a feminist perspective would certainly not be uninteresting... - rarely has a perfumer so clearly and openly acknowledged their central theme: "Cherchez la femme!"