Bourreau Des Fleurs

Bourreau Des Fleurs - Flower Executioner - was the 2017 addition to Serge Lutens' Section d'Or, and the name is the joke: a fragrance built around the explicit absence of any floralcy. What is there instead is the sweetest, smokiest, most resinous corner of the Serge Lutens vocabulary, organised around two principal voices - immortelle and black licorice - over a base built from the house's signature plum-cedar-amber chord. The composition is officially undisclosed; Harrods' launch material listed only caramel, sap, and resin, and Parfumo posted licorice, immortelle, and charred wood. Reviewer wear progressions converge on a fuller picture. The first minutes lay down stewed prunes, plums, and cedar familiar from Bois et Fruits and Arabie, with a brief flicker of cumin and ginger plus a quiet spice undertone. Within five minutes immortelle takes over and dominates the first three hours - a thick, sappy, maple-syrup sweetness with an autumnal golden character. Black licorice rises around the twenty-minute mark and weaves through the immortelle, contributing a faintly bitter, salty, anisic chewiness that prevents the gourmandise from tipping into cloying. By the third hour the spices retreat, the resins (labdanum, Tolu balsam, benzoin, with myrrh in the deep base) step forward, and the structure turns drier, smokier, woodier, more recognisably oriental. The dry-down settles into a smooth-but-dark amber-resin haze that holds steady for hours. Performance is intimate-to-moderate: projection two to two and a half inches in the opening, an intimate two to three inches from the third hour, total wear of twelve to fourteen hours. Bourreau Des Fleurs has been compared by reviewers to Lutens' own Jeux de Peau - the buttered-wheat-toast gourmand - and to Arabie's spice-and-dried-fruit Arabic bazaar; it borrows liberally from both. Whether that pleases or frustrates depends on whether the wearer reads it as a greatest-hits redux or as a genuine final word on the Lutens immortelle-resin idiom. Original price was €480-550 / £425 for 50 ml; today the parfum is functionally collector-only and trades at a steep premium on the secondary market.