‘Or you might seek a connection, a person, who seems to respond to your needs. Someone to complete you, someone to cover you, someone to satisfy you. Are you happy now? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe you will only find yourself with more questions, more needs. And the happiness is fleeting. So you turn back.
Home. Where you know the language, the food, the scents. Home. Where you can be complete on your own. Home. Where you can rest and make new dreams. And how does this feel, to discover the happiness that was there all along? LIKE THIS.’ – Etat Libre D’Orange
Inspired by the English actress Tilda Swinton. Her favorite scent is the scent of home, so she wanted a fragrance that will be a magical potion with that kind of smell.
“I have always located my favourite fragrances at the doorways of kitchens, in the heart of a greenhouse, at the bottom of a garden. Scent means place to me : place and state of mind – even state of grace. Certainly state of ease. My favourite smells are the smells of home, the experience of the reliable recognisable after the exotic adventure: the regular – natural – turn of the seasons, simplicity and softness after the duck and dive of definition in the wide, wide world.
When Mathilde Bijaoui first asked me what my own favourite scent in a bottle might contain, I described a magic potion that I could carry with me wherever I went that would hold for me the fragrance – the spirit – of home. The warm ginger of new baking on a wood table, the immortelle of a fresh spring afternoon, the lazy sunshine of my grandfather’s summer greenhouse, woodsmoke and the whiskey peat of the Scottish Highlands after rain. I told her about a bottle of spirit, something very simple, to me : something almost indescribable, so personal it should be. The miracle is that Mathilde made it.
The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote : If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is,
or what “God’s fragrance” means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close. Like this.
This is possibly my favourite poem of all time.
It restores me like the smoke/rain/gingerbread/ greenhouse my scent-sense is fed by. It is a poem about simplicity, about human-scaled miracles. About trust. About home. In my fantasy there is a lost chapter of Alice in Wonderland – after the drink saying Drink Me, after the cake pleading Eat Me – where the adventuring, alien, Alice, way down the rabbit hole, far from the familiar and maybe somewhat homesick – comes upon a modest glass with a ginger stem reaching down into a pale golden scent that humbly suggests : Like This…” – Tilda Swinton
