Would You Wear a Fragrance That Smells Like Paper?
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When perfumer Fabrice Pellegrin began work on Diptyque’s newest scent, he started—literally—with a blank page. “I was asked,” he said, “to create the scent of paper. I thought, ‘This will be a challenge,’ but I decided to play the game and see what I could do.” The finished fragrance, L’Eau Papier is a thing of beauty, and not least because it is so wonderfully out of the ordinary.
Why paper? As Diptyque SVP Laurence Semichon explains, paper is at the very heart of the Diptyque story. The brand’s founders—Desmond Knox-Leet, Christiane Montadre-Gautrot and Yves Coueslant—were artists and dreamers who revered the practice of drawing. Indeed, every Diptyque fragrance since the first in 1961 has featured a miniature artwork on its paper oval label (two, in fact—one on the outside and one that can be seen when looking through the juice on the inside). “Drawing is what makes the mind travel,” says Semichon. “It is what opens your imagination. That was the starting point for this fragrance. The idea of paper as a place to dream.
Diptyque L'Eau Papier Eau de Toilette at Nordstrom, Size 3.1 Oz
$175.00
nordstrom.com
When you first spray L’Eau Papier, you smell steamed rice and sesame seeds, notes that Pellegrin employed to convey the idea of textured rice paper and ink. And then, mimosa—sourced in Grasse and selected by Pellegrin to introduce a “velvety aspect” —appears in a bloom of radiant honey-and-hay floralcy. The drydown is musk, with a creaminess suggestive of a white sheet of paper, and cedar, which is intended to evoke pencil shavings. As fragrance progressions go, this may sound strange—but only (pun intended) on paper. In reality, the scent is not only truly lovely, but also incredibly wearable; a shapeshifter that smells more like a clean musk on some skins and like a soft floral on others.
French artist Alix Waline—whose work you may have seen if you have visited the Diptyque boutique on Rue Saint-Honoré where she created a showstopping wall mural—was enlisted to create the artwork for L’Eau Papier. On the external label, her abstract black-and-white composition mimics a wash of calligraphy ink; on the inside, a landscape scene details ingredients within the scent, including sesame, mimosa flower, and musk. “We chose Fabrice because he knew the founders, and he knows the Diptyque archives by heart, and we chose Alex because her work is so delicate, so perfect for this project,” says Semichon. “When creating something new, we always ask ourselves: If the founders were alive today, what would they do? It’s not, ‘what did they do?’ It’s now. Who would they work with, what would they like to see or smell, where would they like to travel?”
In this case, it’s the idea of creative freedom expressed in scent. A work of art to which you add your individual signature, a story that you make up as you go along, every time you wear it.
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