Not Marie-Antoinette – Review: Lubin Black Jade
The stories perfume houses want us to believe…
“A flacon made of black jade hid the last gentle breath of a long-kept secret. The recipe, that Pierre François Lubin as an apprentice had secretly copied from Jean Louis Fargeon, purveyor to the Duke of Angouleme, has now been found. Marie-Antoinette ordered the fragrance as the Trianon garden was being built in Versailles, far from her sumptuous life at court where she enjoyed halcyonic days before the eruption of turmoil and revolution.
The perfume recipe was entrusted to a noble lady and a loyal friend of Marie-Antoinette’s and has survived over the centuries. The fragrance, which today has been revived, was described by Lubin up until the 1930s as “Jardin Secret”.
-excerpted from the press material via First in Fragrance
This is a great example of things marketing people say to make us buy perfume. Allegedly this is a perfume made after the original recipe of Marie Antoinette’s favorite scent. The name results from the “fact” that she carried it always about her person in a black jade flask.
Octavian Coifan calls it a fake, and I have to say I tend to believe him a lot more than the marketing folks at Lubin, but that is my personal opinion after all, everyone is free to choose the version they prefer. Or disregard the entire back story and just concentrate on the juice, which is lovely after all, based on an old recipe or not. (Okay, you may regard the super pretty bottle as well, I love it and therefore included three images of it for your viewing pleasure.)
Black Jade was created in 2011 by Olivia Giacobetti Thomas Fontaine (according to new information) and includes notes of galbanum, bergamot, cardamom, rose, jasmine, incense, cinnamon, Indian sandalwood, patchouli, vanilla, tonka bean and amber.
All the frills aside, Black Jade is a spicy rose on an ambery base.
Opening with fresh bergamot and a tiny dollop of galbanum, a good dose of cardamom appears quickly and stays for a while, enveloping the emerging rosy-jasminy heart in a spicy veil, assisted by cinnamon and a bit of incense.
The base is nice, soft sandalwood over ambery vanilla.
Black Jade is voluptuous, but transparent, it is never overwhelming although it is quite diffusive, it lasts for about four hours on me. Not bad at all.
I can’t get rid of the feeling that I would be able to enjoy this a lot more, had it been released without the Marie-Antoinette angle and the resulting hullabaloo of overwrought expectations on the one hand or the growing indignation on the other.
Black Jade is a good fragrance, and while it doesn’t floor me, I enjoy wearing it and it garnered a few compliments here and there.
Nope, that's not Marie-Antoinette either, it's Kirsten Dunst.
I like it, but for what it is worth, I don’t for one second imagine it as Marie-Antoinette’s perfume. (This one is much more like it!) Another Marie-Antoinette inspired perfume is the sadly discontinued La Haie Fleurie from L’Artisan Parfumeur, created by Jean-Claude Ellena in his pre-minimalistic period. Maybe I should go looking for my sample of that one next…
Update, Oct.24: According to the owner of the House of Lubin, Gilles Thevenin, the perfumer credited with Black Jade is not Olivia Giacobetti, but Thomas Fontaine.
Image source: luckyscent.com, mein-duft.de, sarcastig.blogspot.com
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80 Responses to Not Marie-Antoinette – Review: Lubin Black Jade
Well, the note-list doesn’t sound bad… (as opposite to the marketing blah-blah, which does and is entirely contraproductive at least for two people already : for you and for me…)
True. But they must not trust their juice very much at Lubin, if they think they need a big story to bolster it.
What on earth make them think that I’d belive those obscure ideas ??? I’m not a complete lunatic ! But they think we’re and that annoys me the most on all those marketing stories around … I mean they have a nice little flacon and the Giacobetti there – that’s a nice enough marketing already.
Absolutely. They are not exactly hiding the fact that Olivia Giacobetti did the perfume, but it is not immediately apparent either, instead they focus on the stupid Marie Antoinette story. Deep, deep sigh.
Luckily for me, I sampled this without reading the blurb (actually, I stopped in the middle here too, I just have no patience in reading that kind of thing, to remain polite).
I like it – like you said, I’m not floored by it, but it’s one of those perfumes that I would grab without hesitation in the morning while getting ready for work.
And the bottle is truly lovely.
Very politely said!
I agree, nice perfume, lovely bottle, unnecessary story.
Interesting… I have to agree with you too, the Marie-Antoinette angle may set the bar a little too high, expectations may fall. But this sounds like some nice stuff none-the-less.
It is some pretty nice stuff, I’d love to have a bottle would it fall from the sky, although I wouldn’t invest in one myself. Marie-Antoinette or not.
“nice perfume, lovely bottle, unnecessary story”.
The first thing I thought of when I read your review and the above quote was the Creed house. I’ve read fanciful stories about the house and individual perfumes that are suspect and unnecessary. Why tell the tall tales when the fragrance good enough to stand on its own merits?
A really good question. Maybe the people who manage those companies don’t believe in their product. They feel they have to embellish or flat out lie to sell it. That is sad.
I went to college with two (wonderful, beautiful, and intelligent) sisters who each owned and wore a Creed perfumw— each chosen for the woman the scent was supposedly originally created for, and that they as individuals identified with.
Did the fragrances smell good? Nope, not at all (but that’s partly that they were not to my taste), but if you asked about the perfumes they wore, you didn’t get information about the fragrance, you got the (supposed) back-story.
Two otherwise incredibly smart girls, totally buying into the aspirational identity of the Creed house!
That is a truly sad story, indeed. But it perfectly illustrates the whole phenomenon, the word is more powerful than the scent in the minds of many.
Sounds more like one of Olivia Giacobetti’s own creations then if it is “transparent”. The PR people covered themselves though by slipping in the bit about the “old recipe”, which is just as well, or we could only conclude that Olivia has very good genes or has had a lot of “work” done since the 18th C.
And I love L’Intrigante that you introduced me to, so that places me more at the scene of M-A’s actual possible perfume preferences!
On an off-topic and rather silly side note, back in the 80s I interviewed the Head of Engineering for a well known brand of French cakes, whose surname was Marie-Antoinette!
V, so how did Monsieur Marie-Antoinette smell? Maybe that’ll give us a clue? So funny that he sold cake of all things!
Marie-Antionette & CAKE … LOL (a pity he wasn’t a boulanger…)
Vanessa, now I’m intrugued to know which french cake… – macaron, eventually ?
It is the modern day marketing that most companies seem to pay for…
Like the many bad commercials that run rampant in Television Ads.
I’d rather if they are going to invent a fairy tale to sell a product, that they
create a new tale to tell…go all out and design a story that can be sold with the
perfume…perhaps a mysterious stepped back in time or a step forward in time
story line? It would be more interesting and not a twist or out and out lie to sell
the products.
But that is just my opinion….the perfume does sound interesting though. A Spicy Rose.
Hazel, I agree— I am head-over-heels in love with the stories Tarleisio has written for the Amouage fragrances (especially for Memoir Woman), and would love to see that sort of thing become part of the “package” so to speak!
What an interesting idea! Hermes did something like that for Eau de Merveilles – there was a set where the (LE) flacon was accompanied with a booklet that contained a short story by a writer, written especially for the perfume. But that is not a very well known fact, sadly and it was only available in Hermes boutiques for a limited time.
I’m really fond of Olivia Giacobetti, whose talent speaks for itself— do you know, for al