Review of Noir Premier Or Intemporel 1888 by Yaroslavna Lasytsya

Cardamom and black pepper make a curious pair; though both are spices, they strike the nose with a metallic chill, as if their warmth had been stripped away and replaced by the glint of steel. Through this cold, austere curtain, tobacco breaks forth, broad-shouldered and confident, softening the angles, warming the air, and lending flesh and colour to a composition already animated by the light, hovering aura of coffee and the discreet oriental shimmer of nutmeg. I perceive, scattered across this bewildering brew, a few sun-dried berries, like forgotten jewels, and even, in a fleeting mirage, a breath of shimmering silver ragwort—impossible apparition, no doubt, yet one the imagination insists upon. This gold is rhodium-plated: it lacks the familiar warmth and opulence of its yellow brother; it is withdrawn, almost distant, aristocratic and wrapped up in itself, contemplating its own reflection. In spite of its generous cargo of spices, “Or Intemporel” steps forward with a fresh, airy bearing, unencumbered by the usual heaviness or cloying embrace by which such notes so often stake their claim. Here, vanilla is held in check and brought to heel by tolu balsam; its sweetness is dressed in a rather stiff tailcoat of resin, with starched batiste at the throat, so that one feels obliged to straighten one’s back, to weigh each gesture, to choose one’s words carefully in its presence. The perfume itself would tolerate no slouching, not even in a single fleeting exhalation. This gold is timeless in truth, for it is neither so simple as to lapse into primitivism, nor so adorned as to tumble into the bourgeois excess that borders on vulgarity. It owes its superiority to nothing but itself: well-polished and consistent, with clear, flowing lines and a perfectly laconic, classical execution that refuses both rhetoric and ornament. Upon the skin, the scent warms with an elegant slowness, yet never loses its singular profile or its curious, slightly paradoxical expression. It is perfectly unisex, at ease in the strict geometry of the office as in the soft confusion of salons and soirées, adjusting itself with equal propriety to business and social encounters. “Or Intemporel” recalls the contradictory ambitions of the Third Republic, raised upon the foundations of the Second Empire: a regime whose statesmen, still largely of aristocratic blood, dreamed of democracy and liberty in words tempered by instinctive conservatism. Their ideals, lofty yet constrained, opened the doors just wide enough to admit the winds of change and, with them, the storms of popular discontent that would, for decades, remake France—patiently, violently, and beyond their control.