Manakara smells like a color-saturated contemporary painting, as if Barnett Newman’s 1966 “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” somehow exuded scent from its glaring acrylic surface. Kurkdjian olfactorily “photographed” rose and lychee, then treated those natural scents with an acid wash of synthetic perfumery raw materials. The resulting perfume is brilliant, vibrating between real, delicate rose-lychee and an intentionally disorienting neon gas version. The perfume is well-constructed, mesmerizing and slightly outrageous. (The perfumer Sofia Grojsman created a similar work of olfactory color theory, called Outrageous, for Frédéric Malle; in that case, it was the scent of a Mondrian.)
Tihota (Indult’s names are slightly precious) is a similar morphing of vanilla bean and musk, though calmer and a bit more literalist. Kurkdjian uses the musks (the smell of warm skin) to nicely punch up vanilla’s roasted aspect. And Isvaraya is a patchouli and plum that takes one of the most marvelous natural raw materials — patchouli’s rich creamy/earthy/grassy scent tinged with tropical humidity and a trace of exquisite rot — and injects a subtle, juicy, darkish fruit into its veins. The grass becomes succulent and edible. It’s magical work.
The least interesting Indult scent was created for the ultra-exclusive Paris store Colette. C16 is not bad, it’s just a bit of a gimmick — 16 musks, “all together now!” — and is, in a sense, the exact opposite of the house’s latest, created for the ultra-exclusive Los Angeles perfume outfit Lucky Scent, whose online arm is the only place that sells Indult in the United States. Luckyscent.com is run by Franco Wright and Adam Eastwood, whose physical store, Scent Bar (8327 Beverly Boulevard), is Hollywood’s source for niche, avant-garde perfumes you can’t find anywhere else. One of these will certainly be the new Rêve en Cuir.
Leather — old, dark, smoky, heavy — is diabolically difficult to adapt to an accessible 21st-century format. Under the creative direction of Maselli, Wright and Eastwood, Kurkdjian has succeeded masterfully. Rêve is a delectable, edible, light-infused leather that is instantly legible, deliciously impossible, as if an Hermès belt had been candied and baked by a patissier. Technically perfect (it lasts and diffuses like clockwork), it is also an aesthetic triumph. Hermès’s own Kelly Calèche wonderfully modernized leather; Rêve en Cuir is even better, stronger and more daring. It is not just the leather you never imagined — it is also the gourmand you never imagined. Indeed, membership has its privileges.
