The Iron Maiden: Between dire shadows and pure lights …
Give a name of torture to a perfume, Iron Virgin, that can only be Serge Lutens? Especially since the torture is not a torture but rather a sweet symphony where the lily holds the main note, and masterful …
The Iron Virgin, a very curious name for a perfume?
< p> The “marketing sauce” with which the world of classic perfumery adapts is totally absent from the olfactory, creative and imaginative world of Serge Lutens. So whatever the concepts or moralizing speeches, Serge Lutens uses his perfumes to express himself, just as a painter or a novelist creates a work, without the specific desire to sell it but just for the pleasure of sharing it. . Even if the work is shocking or the title given leaves us questioning. Because yes The Iron Virgin was torture, a name that would seem a priori therefore impossible to relate to a perfume, so much it is supposed to exude well-being and beauty and not terror.
In the present case , The Iron Maiden is indeed a provocation by its author. It titillates our fears and our deep terrors to make them come out of our skins with a perfume. Because every human is light and shadow, all of Lutens’ perfumes are chiaroscuro. The Iron Madonna echoes her terribly human opposites and offers a lily that is sometimes pure and virginal, like the Virgin who has often worn it, sometimes dark and sensual like the “sublime torture” of our wounds of love.
Ode to the chiaroscuro lily by La Vierge de Fer de Lutens
The Iron Maiden is anything but a white and busy water, sad or austere as its transparent and pale bottle might suggest.
Think again, the great Lutens has trapped you again! Moreover, it suffices to dive into the first fruity and green notes of this Iron Virgin to understand that this perfume will have absolutely nothing of the torture, if it is only that the torture of resisting it… The departure is made therefore fusing and vegetal like a rise in power increased by metallic aldehydes which make us tremble.
Here is finally the precious guest of lilies which arrives at the heart of the composition and we are reassured by the ultra-feminine scents of the pretty white flower which spreads with pleasure alongside the daffodils. Much more, the lily will offer itself to deep sensualities to which it was hardly used by mixing with a burning incense and some oriental spices.
Lutens sees future followers of The Iron Maiden as “people who desire to come out of their own fear. This is the theme of this perfume: the fear that you have to overcome to be yourself. “. 1 So this odyssey in crescendo of the lily has fun making us tremble before comforting us just as Lutens frightens us with a strange name to better offer us this magnificent flowery fragrance sweet like spring and the young lady.
The universe of Serge Lutens perfumery is a mysterious and colorful universe, luminous but sometimes dark, where fragrances are born as if to better surprise us. The man is an artist who likes to create original but above all unique perfumes. The man is surrounded for his compositions by the best of perfumers but perhaps also by one of the freest: Christopher Sheldrake, of course! And for this perfume in the name of torture, the torture will be divine …
The Iron Virgin, a composition that plays with our fears to take us to the light
Since their meeting for the revolutionary and spectacular Féminité du bois at the end of the 70s, Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake have never ceased to compose together grandiose, poetic creations but above all a thousand miles away current commercial criteria for perfumery.
Because the two men are imaginative and above all want to keep their free creativity to compose rare perfumes. While one offers his emotions in scents, the second, the technician, draws the desires of the great Lutens in perfumes.
“Perfume has now become a socio-cultural product. Personally, I prefer to get to the bottom of things; a real underground velvet, or underground velvet, as we say in English, that is to say: what is us and what we need to come out of ourselves. “Serge Lutens for 20 Minutes.
For the Iron Maiden, the two men had fun creating a perfume totally opposite to the image given by her name, referring to medieval torture. They also changed their principles of chiaroscuro compositions to bring the Iron Maiden to a luminous halo of white flowers, greenery, fruit and heat.
So do not be surprised not to find in this Virgin of Iron some icy freshness of steel. On the contrary, the Iron Maiden and its floral-fruity scents become, as the discovery progresses, more and more warm. Serge Lutens will always have fun blurring the lines and playing antitheses, this Iron Virgin is the perfect example.
Roses, jasmines and lilies for an original scented bouquet called La Vierge de Fer
Serge Lutens does not like to reveal the ingredients of the compositions that the magician Christopher Sheldrake has developed for him.
So if we follow the details of the master, The Iron Maiden would be composed of aldehydes in the head, lily in the heart and incense in its depths. In fact, many other raw materials help us to propel us from cold to hot in this curious Iron Virgin.
Thus the top aldehydes are, in the end, relatively little present, contrary to what the ‘we could have been led to believe. Indeed, it is the green notes but above all the fruity notes that welcome us in this Iron Virgin. According to specialists, these notes are scents of pears, apples, or even bananas or white peaches! Serge Lutens loves discovery and he hides these juicy fruits from us the better to create it.
However, this is not the only surprise revealed by this Iron Virgin. Because the virginal and powerful lily will go to bathe in the very “Lutensian” universe which we know well but which nobody expects with this perfume: the Orient and the spices. The Iron Maiden is therefore a rare journey which begins with the freshness and fruitiness of nature upon awakening and which ends in a beautiful, bewitching and spicy warmth of which only Serge Lutens has the secret.
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