Le Bain De Lulu

Art Of Seduction

In Lulu's Bath, playful coquette and femme fatale co-exist as one. Spicy layers of cardamom, nutmeg, and burnt sugar transform a delicate base of powdery violet and rose into an addictive orchestra of sultry contrasts.

My first exposure to Lulu’s world was at the New York Metropolitan Opera in 2015. The stellar musical performances and innovative staging of the opera Lulu, composed by Alban Berg, is the raw distillation of a woman gone mad in relentless pursuit of satisfying the whims of her ego. In true operatic fashion, Lulu is a slave to her pathology, vacillating between mercurial duality as an abused abuser, loveless lover, and eventually, a killer who is killed. 

Composer Alban Berg is centrally regarded as one of the main figures of the Second Viennese School (along with Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg). Together, they revolutionized early 20th-century music by introducing atonality and the development of a 12-tone serialism technique. This approach moved away from traditional tonal structures and served as a foundation for more modern, avant-garde music to follow. 

It was through this 12-tone serialist technique that Berg infused the life and passion of the character of Lulu as a core component of the complexity of human duality. The contrast of romanticism infused with discordant chaos, dissonant harmonies, and dynamic textures provided a new, tense backdrop for Lulu’s dramatic outbursts and tender soliloquies. 

I began to wonder what this enigmatic character’s life may have been like. To capture Lulu’s essence through fragrance, I imagined her getting ready for an event. While it may look chaotic to the outsider, her meticulously orchestrated routine belies a carefully executed preening ritual. Her vanity, littered with strings of pearls, combs, compacts, and a bar of frothy, floral soap, set the scene for the fragrance's development. A fine mist from her hot bath hangs in the air. 

A base of powdery violet lingers throughout the fragrance’s transformation to remind us of Lulu’s core vulnerability, while rose hovers in and out of fleeting moments of tenderness and allure. Finally, spicy facets of cardamom, nutmeg, pepper, and burnt sugar reveal Lulu’s true complexity as she leaps from playful coquette to femme fatale in an instant. 

Le Bain de Lulu (Lulu’s Bath), is an olfactive narrative about navigating a multifaceted world of contrasts. As you wear this fragrance, embrace the light and dark, sweet and spicy, and masculine and feminine within us all. 

—Sean Colbert 

• Top Notes: Cardamom, Valencia Orange, Floral 
• Heart Notes: Rose, Caramel, Plum
• Base Notes: Violet, Oakmoss, Woods 

Quality: Floral, Spice, Seductive