Nombre Noir

The One

Large factice of Nombre Noir. Photo: LT

Update: comments are now closed.

Note: two decants (I’m stingy with NN) will be sent to two commenters, as usual chosen at random.

Nombre Noir is the perfume that tipped me over into perfumery. It came out in 1982 and was Serge Lutens’s first fragrance for Shiseido. They had hired him for their makeup line, a perfect match at the time between a slightly dowdy major brand and a genius makeup creator with a fondness for kabuki. Shiseido’s fragrances were then little known in the West, though Zen, composed by the great Josephine Catapano, and Tactics, a wonderful aldehydic, had some success. Shiseido wanted to do something big.

Lutens much later explained to me that, in his experience, the Japanese take a long time deciding but then do not do things by halves. They clearly gave him a free hand. Nombre Noir is a textbook example of coherent top-down design. Lutens loves funereal black, so the name, packaging and look were all of one piece. In the ‘80s context, on the perfume floor of a department store, the Nombre Noir stand was a black hole that brought to mind the funereal drape thrown over a roulette table when a player breaks the bank. I had just moved to Nice at the time. I went to the newly-opened mall on the main drag and saw the shiny black display with sales attendants dressed like mourners. One of them sprayed Nombre Noir on my hand and I had an epiphany.

At this point I could lapse into what classical music critics disparagingly call “easy lyricism” and describe once again the effect NN had on me. Forty-something years later, however, I think a more forensic approach is called for. I am inspired by Jacques Vaché’s insight as communicated to André Breton, “It is in the very essence of symbols to be symbolic,” to ask what, in Nombre Noir’s essence, works the magic. A little detour via fragrance chemistry is required. Nombre Noir is first and foremost a damascone fragrance. An analysis I had done on a sample some time back revealed that the majority of the apparently fairly simple formula was a mixture of four damascones in roughly equal amounts.

Damascones are contained in many natural products, including rose oil, and are closely related to the ionones of violets by a flip of one structural motif in the molecule. Ionones, as I’ve said before, are plenty poetic. The ionone of violets fluctuates in our perception like a Necker Cube, between sweet-floral and dry-woody. Damascones fluctuate too on a different axis, between rose and apple. (By this I mean a lush, fluorescent, almost metallic rose and a tart Granny Smith bordering on lemon.) Their closeness to ionones can still be felt in the background as an underlying dry woody note.

What all of this adds up to is not so much a fragrance character as a complex, contradictory soul. Many natural materials embody traits. Vetiver is austere; incense, luminous; violet leaf, hissy; oakmoss, craggy. These are complex mixtures of molecules. Single aromachemicals rarely achieve this unless they are in reality mixtures of isomers. Perfumers speak about facets of a given material, but only a few pure molecules have facets of equal size. Ionones and damascones are among them. What that means is that Nombre Noir is not about an accord of different materials but about the dual nature of damascones themselves. The smallest component parts of a fragrance based on damascones will not be “notes” but more like sentient monads.

What do the damascone monads say? Many years ago, the genius French comedian Coluche had a radio show on which he asked callers nonsensical questions. One of them left a mark on me. The question was, “How old was Rimbaud?” I have pondered it ever since. Rimbaud wrote like a child genius all his short life, but how old exactly was that genius child? My guess would be about 9. I believe every European country has a different youthful genius in its makeup. The British one is a feral six-year-old barefoot girl. The Italian is an elegant adolescent tomboy. The French child-genius is a fierce little witch unafraid of wolves.

Damascones have the soul of that last little demon, small, intensely colored, and capable of turning instantly from languid to acid. When she speaks, her turn of phrase is vivid and curt, like that of Rimbaud (and incidentally also his sister Vitalie). Part of Rimbaud’s greatness is that he channels the exact raspy elegance that used to be the mark of the French language until courtly manners set in. (I once met a sixty-year-old seamstress from Poitiers who spoke like that. It was like having dinner with Mme de La Fayette.)

Now back to Nombre Noir. Inside the black bottle was an invisible liquid that by all rights should have looked like purple ink for love letters; it gave an impression of the intense, eternal freshness of a sunlit stained-glass window. It was acidic, woody and sultry at the same time. I fell in love not with the perfume but with the little witch soul inside it. Nombre Noir was soon discontinued. Lutens told me it had been the worst nightmare of his professional life and seemed to shudder as he recounted it. The lovely Chinese-looking stoppered octagonal bottles leaked so frequently that entire batches were recalled and destroyed with a bulldozer.

The world took a turn for the worse soon after, when the dermatology tail started wagging the fragrance dog. Damascones turned out to be skin sensitizers and were restricted to a level that made Nombre Noir impossible. It took me years to get a second bottle after I had foolishly given away the first. I even bought a factice to keep the memory alive. A friend found a stash in the Emirates and gave me one. Then a perfumer friend made me a reconstruction based on the GC. I smell it occasionally and sometimes fleetingly get that coup de foudre feeling again.

One more thing. The composition of Nombre Noir is credited to Jean-Yves Leroy, who at the time worked for Givaudan in Japan. He was described to me as more of a sales guy than perfumer, but this must be inaccurate. Nombre Noir is his only fragrance, and he took his own life some years later.