Banks, hillsides, ravines, and wastelands. You see them everywhere. Smell them nowhere. No fragrance celebrates them. And yet, even the unwanted plants we call weeds are fragrant. Because they grow on their own, spontaneous, carefree, perennial, untamable. Scorned by men, like the misfits and outcasts who fiercely guard their true nobility out of reticence, or because they ask nothing of anyone…
Mal-Aimé is Marc-Antoine Corticchiato’s tribute to plants banished from perfume bottles and posh neighborhoods. Going against the grain of fine fragrance, which only lays claim to noble materials, the iconoclastic Mal-Aimé draws its inspiration from a plant as common as its essence is rare. In fact, this is the first time it is used in perfumery.
Fragrant inula grows all over Corsica in disheveled tufts of tiny yellow flowers. Its essential oil, distilled from plants harvested in the maquis and certified organic, is a genuine treasure trove for a perfumer. Over the hours, the emerald green essence unfolds wildly generous facets.
Herbal? That’s the least one could expect, given its nature. But inula also borrows its fragrance from roses and its sweetness from honey. Its scent is as solar as the color of its flowers, yet it is also woody, saline, musky.
Around this beautiful rebel, it is the procession of all the unloved – thistles, nettles, brambles, and roots – that Marc-Antoine Corticchiato calls up to celebrate, once again, his native Corsica.
Disruptive, avant-garde, never smelled before. Naturally noble. Unquestionably iconoclastic. A perfume like no other.
What We Think
Parfum d'Empire's gift for balancing rustic naturalism and French elegance delivers with a warm, green, herbaceous fragrance that evokes wild, overgrown, sun-soaked countryside.
