Diptyque, your favourite niche brand's favourite niche brand

Newsletter #14: what is Les Essences de Diptyque?

It is May, Easter’s over, and Australia is slipping quickly towards winter. The mornings are beginning with the kind of cold that makes you want to stay snuggled up in bed. I’m starting to get that itch, the perfume itch, when none of my usual go-to bottles will do. I stand above my collection for a few minutes every morning knowing that what I want is something I can’t have, something I’ve never smelled before.

This feeling means it’s the perfect time to dig deeper into the sample collection and venture out to smell new things wherever possible. Sometimes my nose craves the scent of something novel and brilliant - the problem is that you usually have to smell through a lot of boring things to get there.

On a recent, restless sniffing journey I had the chance to smell the new collection from Diptyque: Les Essences. The line stands out at the Diptyque counter in their square bottles, distinct from the brand’s famous oval shape with its headache inducing typography.

The Essences line live in etched glass bottles that look as thin as a knife’s edge; they are lined up shoulder to shoulder like soldiers in the training yard. We have spoken before about batch release perfume collections and why they’re almost always a bad idea - it’s hard enough to make one good perfume at a time, let alone five. But I wanted to smell something new, and Diptyque often has its moments of brilliance, so I gave Les Essences a try.

The short summary of Les Essences is that they’re bad. The longer summary is that they’re bad, expensive, and aimless, which is perfumery’s unholy trinity. Who are these perfumes for, why did Diptyque decide to sell them at $500AUD a bottle, and what can they tell us about the landscape of perfume today?

Before #PerfumeTok and Delina flankers and brands with colourful, childlike bottles took over your feed, the first wave of social media perfume influencers in the 2010s were all about minimalism.

Much like a hipster coffee shop in a gentrified neighbourhood the perfume brands that gained the most social media traction a decade ago had simple black and white bottles that could be spotted in the background of Vogue roundups and instagram posts and Top Shelf articles across the internet. These brands eschewed traditional advertising because they didn’t need it. They had something more powerful: word of mouth success, aspirationalism, influence. It’s a grassroots phenomenon that many brands have tried to recreate artificially since, with little success.

The three biggest brands that haunted the bathroom cabinets of every 2010s insta baddie were Le Labo, Byredo, and Diptyque. Of these it is Diptyque that is the most literate, the most artistic, and of the most interest to the perfume aficionado.

In a lot of very real ways Diptyque is the forefather of every pseudo-intellectual niche perfume brand that we see on the market today. Their approach to scent and bottle design, marketing, and retail presence have been mimicked countless times over. The brand is a trendsetter in the industry as well as with consumers.

Diptyque began in the 1960’s, founded by three artists, and it is artistry that has become the brand’s house code. The brand is an embodiment of post-war avant-garde Paris. Diptyque was founded in 1961 as France was unsticking itself from the mess of the Algerian War for Independence; its first fragrance was released in 1968 as the May Riots overtook the country. As a brand it is unerringly, exhaustingly French, but at the same time is not so bound to the parameters of classical French perfumery as the designer houses.

For any perfume brand it’s important to know where the money comes from, and Diptyque is an interesting case. Since 2005 they’ve been owned by the private equity firm Manzanita Capital, the same parent that has stakes in similarly intelligentsian brands DS&Durga and Malin + Goetz.

Diptyque are an outlier in the perfume industry in so many ways. They are by now a legacy brand but still feel avant-garde; they are a niche brand but avoid the common pitfalls of overly synthetic compositions and endless flankers; though owned by private equity they have avoided the snapping jaws of the big conglomerates, who would doubtless shred the brand of any character it has.

The brand also has an interesting dynamic with their perfumers. Though they have always followed the traditional method of consulting with the big oil houses, Diptyque works with a small group of perfumers who help to shape the ‘house DNA’. Many of their scents were created by the late, brilliant Olivier Pescheux, and they have a similar patron-painter dynamic with Fabrice Pellegrin.

It is clear when you sniff a Diptyque perfume that the brand understands what it wants from their perfumers. Diptyque began as a single store - famously at Boulevard 34 Saint-German, which many of their scents are named for - and its owners wanted to use scent to create an atmosphere for their patrons. This is the origin point of Diptyque candles and eventually their perfume line.

Thus the scent of that store in the Latin Quarter in the 1960’s wafts into every bottle of perfume - a slightly thick cedar-and-cream smell, lactonic and powdery and dry. It’s a beautiful smell - so chic, so Diptyque - but it’s best in small doses and can take some getting used to.

I find nothing as distressing as a lack of character, both in people and in perfume, and Diptyque have been guilty of this on occasion. Their lineup of scents seems to float between wan, waifish things - the pallid Orpheon is precisely how I expect the ghost in a Victorian gothic to smell - and enormous hitters that rank high amongst the list of best in show perfumes for their central material. Tam Dao, Benjoin Boheme, Tempo, Do Son, Philosykos - these scents hold their place in the great pantheon of perfumery.

I never know which Diptyque I’m going to get when I venture out to smell their new releases - the fainting girl who needs a trip to the seaside for her health, or the bulldozing unsinkable. Unfortunately, with Les Essences what I got was neither.

Les Essences consists of five perfumes that are each centered on a fantasy note from nature that has 'no natural, distinctive fragrance of its own.’ They are:

• Corail Oscuro speaks of coral, flourishing across the bed of the Venetian lagoon. In this perfume, mandarin is infused with rose bourbon absolute and carried by a salty mineral accord.

• Lunamaris conjures up mother of pearl – a natural treasure symbolic of purity.. The changing, iridescent colours of mother of pearl are expressed in a fragrance that blends notes of pink peppercorn, incense and rockrose.

• Bois Corsé tells a tale of bark, the vital protective mantle that shields the vulnerable core of the tree. Bois Corsé offers a blend of black coffee absolute, sandalwood and tonka bean that feels like an invitation to trace the knotty grain of the bark.

• Lilyphéa celebrates the water lily – that remarkable aquatic plant, rising from the depths of a pond to reveal its beauty to the world. A dreamlike vision, captured in a fragrance that combines cardamom, violet leaves and vanilla.

• Rose Roche evokes the desert rose, a bloom shaped by air, water and the sun. In this perfume, lemon notes meet those of centifolia rose and patchouli.

The concept of building perfumes around fantasy notes is a strong one. When there’s no natural comparison to be made the perfume always smells better to the sniffer. There are some brilliant perfumes built on fantasy concepts - Black Orchid is one of them; Zoologist has built a whole brand on them - but it is important that the actual perfume is interesting too.

And that is the original sin of Les Essences - they are boring. These perfumes are watery, halfhearted, and last about as long as they can hold your interest. They smell like the scent they pump into the air of a three star hotel you’re sent to for a team building work conference; they smell like overpriced car freshener; they smell like the body care gift set that you give to the aunt you don’t really like when you get her for Kris Kringle.

I smelled Les Essences one by one with a mild sense of dread, quixotically hoping the next one would be the good one until I got to the end and there was nothing to do but go back to the start again and interrogate further.

The most forceful of the set you can see by the colour of the juice - it’s Bois Corse, which we will generously call an amber. The scent is a haymaker to the gut full of tonka bean paired with yet another portrait to hang in the gallery of failed coffee accords. It is sweet but not overly so, because the entire scent smells like it has been cold pressed for dilution. The creaminess of the tonka paired with what passes for coffee in an alternate universe give this perfume a gourmand feel, and so is probably the most comforting to the sniffer looking for something familiar to cling on to.

There’s an odd, slightly slimy feeling to Lilyphéa, like it’s is the scent of a pond that is full of algae. It’s ozonic and cold and green, but not in that harsh and lovely way of a florist’s shop. The most prominent note in the scent is violet leaf, which I have loved ever since I first smelled Fahrenheit, but feels as out of place and irritating here as a pebble in your shoe. There is a sweetness in the base here that I think is trying to contrast to the vegetal greenness but instead gives the whole thing a sort of oily, sickly sheen, like the feeling in your mouth after you’ve eaten something that has too much palm oil. It is best sprayed quickly and forgotten soon after.

I brightened upon spraying Rose Roche as it opens with an offbeat lemon note that sparks off the central rose like sunshine bouncing off a sapphire. Lemon and rose is an underplayed chord in perfumery. Rose has a lot of commonalities with citrus scents - smell a rose, a citronella candle, and lemon zest one after the other and you’ll see what I mean - so they work together in a clever harmony. Unfortunately, this is structured in the flash and fade top note mirage common to most designer scents, so we lose the lemon pretty quickly. What’s left is a dull rose-patchouli that plods along as you would expect.

Lunamaris is a very obvious and awkward mimicry of Portrait of Lady, a scent which has been duped so often that another one was the last thing perfumery needed. Even in the world of open interpretation I’m unsure how its pink pepper top note or anything that follows could represent mother of pearl, but even without that it is not particularly noteworthy.

Corail Oscuro is the most interesting of the set. Unfortunately it achieves this by opening with a vegetal nightmare that smells like green capsicums, which are the vegetable nature inflicted on humanity as punishment for all the other nice ones. This watery green scent evolves into a harsh, green flower stem sort of thing that is compounded by a mineral base that reminds me of cool, wet stone. The whole scent kind of smells like a terrible spa at a White Lotus resort - tropical with heart notes of existential dread.

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I’m self aware enough to know that every perfume in the world is not made for me and my tastes. This is a good thing - perfumery should be a broad church where you can find many different styles and interpretations of material. Once you establish that a perfume isn’t to your tastes, it’s helpful to puzzle out who it is for - did the perfumer or the brand have a consumer group in mind? Sometimes it is obvious (you will smell a Gen-Z beast mode or gourmand a mile away), but Les Essences smell like they are for no one. They smell like the essay on a topic you didn’t care about that you hand in ten minutes before the deadline.

When I lifted one of the bottles to see the price tag on the bottom, I believe I actually did laugh out loud in the store, a single strangled ha!

$500AUD for each of them, in their 100ml bottles. Five hundred dollars to smell stale coffee and hay. Five hundred dollars to smell like a dirty pond. Five hundred dollars for tropical existential dread.

I feel a bizarre need to try and understand why these perfumes were made and if they are selling in good numbers. Given the price point it is clear that Diptyque’s eye is on the ultra-luxe market - or perhaps they’ve taken the temperature of other niche brands and have hiked their prices to keep up. It’s depressing to think that the furious pace of perfume releases is making legacy brands feel as if they need to churn out lackluster scents. In perfumery more is not more, and five bad perfumes will never outsell one great one.

Focus your efforts into making the brilliance, not the drudgery. I don’t see why anyone would reach for Les Essences when you could take two steps to the left, pick up a bottle of Eau Duelle or Vetyverio for the half the price, and be on your well scented way.

If you go to a Diptyque store or hang around their website, the story you see a hundredfold is that Diptyque is a company that was created by artists. It is a brand that prides itself on craftsmanship, interpreting travel and nature into art forms that include scent and perfume.

It is the uneasy relationship between art - the freedom of expression - and capital - the money you need to keep ensure that freedom persists - that you can smell in Les Essences. It is a fact of the industry that if you want to survive you can’t just make perfumes that are interesting - you also have to make perfumes that are profitable. The failure of Les Essences is that it seems like they are neither.

I hope that for their next release Diptyque takes their time to launch one perfume and make it truly artisanal - the smell of the bellwether niche brand; the smell of that store on the Boulevard Saint German; the scent of the opportunities and ideas that seem to bloom best in turbulent times. ▣

P.S. My internet is fixed! For those who will recall I've been having troubles since February - if you have noticed an uptick in activity from me on Substack that would be why. It's nice to be able to stream video and browse sample sites at night again.