Serge Lutens Chêne

For my previous brief review of this fragrance, read Les Eaux Boisées here.

Chêne was created in 2004 by Serge Lutens and Christopher Sheldrake for the Palais Royal exclusives line. It contains oak-bark tannin, cedar crystals, birch, immortelle, saps, black thyme, beeswax, tonka bean, rum absolute and moss. From that list of notes, you might expect it to smell like wood, and, well... you would be right. Many reviewers write of shadowed, primeval forests, with undergrowth and fallen leaves and autumnal hush - but Chêne has always conjured cut or curing wood and sawdust for me, with that familiar blend of airy, bitter freshness and powdery warmth. The Serge Lutens website in English aptly describes it as "the comfort and magnitude of oak", while the French booklet substitutes ampleur (or "fullness") for the latter word: both terms convey the expansive, radiant quality of the scent. As Luca Turin writes in The Secret of Scent: "If you've spent any time in a covered timber yard, you will know that it is hard not to feel good when in one of these natural cathedrals." The smell of wood feels cleansing and Chêne is a perfume built around this feeling.

The opening seconds of the fragrance are sharp, with an astringent, almost apple-like smell that hovers between a rum drink, aged vinegar and turpentine. This quickly calms into a very lightly sweet and diffusive woodiness. The richness from the rum and wax comes without the bottom-heavy sensuality that often accompanies scents based on sandalwood - while deep, Chêne is an uplifting, rather than grounded scent. The cedar is handled with a very light touch, adding a freshness that is particularly evident in the middle stages. The scent overall is medicinal, but also soft. Oak tannins, like all tannins, are bitter and have that bracing quality found in quinine and other tinctures of barks, but like the tannins in tea, wine, chocolate and tonic, there is something soothing and round about them in dilution. Indeed, bitterness is often a sign of comfort to come, as is implied by our understanding of "medicinal". (Oak bark teas have been used for centuries as anti-diarrheatics and gargles for sore throats. I try not to wonder how our ancestors figured out such a treatment worked for both problems.) Oakmoss, too, is bitter, but with a powdery, skin-warm finish and the later stages of the perfume are cozily bedded on the moss and tonka. The sillage of Chêne is gentle, and it therefore comes as a surprise that the lasting power is excellent. It is a personal, contemplative fragrance, oddly abstract in the way of some Serge Lutens perfumes: the core quality of the natural scent is amplified until there is a weird, almost alien solidity to the fragrance.

For now, Chêne is only available at the Salons du Palais Royal Shiseido in Paris for 100 Euro for a 75 ml bell jar. It is rumoured to be joining the export collection as a limited edition in the fall.