Féminité du Bois Serge Lutens is a Lush Spiced Fruit Tree Stuck in Prague
A Daphne in search of her Apollo
The other night I put on Féminité du Bois by Serge Lutens for the first time since I first received my small vial of it nearly three years ago. Féminité du Bois is a fragrance that tells a story, that ignites the imagination, that fills you with wanderlust. Let me take you through my experience with Féminité du Bois. I recorded it in real time, like Marco Polo taking notes of his fantastic travels through the Far East. Here it is in its entirety, a series of sensual impressions:
There was a floral juicy plum opening that was pretty enough, the light pink juice opening like a fine glass of wine and then….
Longingly, as is so often the case, I wished for the experience of the perfume I saw reviewers describing on Fragrantica. One reviewer wrote she felt like she smelled like a beautiful sexy lush spiced fruit tree wearing Féminité du Bois. I wanted to smell like a beautiful sexy lush spiced fruit tree. I still do.
I saw more fruit tree reviews and was envious of the type of poetic mind that could think of a fruit tree when smelling a perfume until I realized that ‘Féminité du Bois’ translates loosely to ‘Femininity of the Wood.” The tree comments are still inspired but it’s definitely there in the name. Lutens is building his grove of Daphnes.
Féminité du Bois was first released by Shiseido in 1992, a brand Lutens worked with quite extensively for decades doing branding, design, and of course, perfume. Apparently the original formula was somewhat different than the perfume’s modern iteration, and I am tempted to track down an old bottle of the original. Yet, knowing how scents change over time and lose their top notes the older they get, it makes me wonder if I could ever smell the real original fragrance as it was intended.
That is something beautiful about fragrance, it is ephemeral, it takes on a life in its own, it cannot be preserved in any one state. There is no knowing how the unique circumstances of a fragrance will transform the scent. You cannot stop a perfume from aging and transforming with time.
I also love the original bottle Lutens designed for Shiseido, which for me feels like a woman turning into a tree, the sleek brown curves almost sci-fi. When perfume bottles look like organic forms that could be found in a Hieronymus Bosch painting or a Fantastic Planet-style alien mutation I think it is very inspired and cool.
When I first put on Féminité du Bois the other night, INXS’s music video for “Never Tear Us Apart” was playing on the television. This led to me associating Féminité du Bois with the dark streets of Prague in winter. I envisioned the spiced fruit tree Lutens wanted to plant in my senses, but a spiced fruit tree surrounded by urbanity and lost time.
The fruit here felt slightly off too, more like a surrealist plum from a scene in one of Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer’s fever dreams. In Svankmajer’s film Faust (1994), I remember Faust sitting at a restaurant in Prague and eating some sort of peach looking jelly that looked both appetizing and unappealing simultaneously. That’s how I feel about the fruits in Féminité du Bois. The plum is there offering me to partake but what else is there hiding around the corner? If I bite the plum, will I be unprepared for what I find underneath the skin? There is also something about it that is not of the forest but of the city, trying to set its roots into the pavement. Something alien and otherworldly. Féminité du Bois is attempting to create her own unnatural history, a solitary arbor of one in the dark city streets. I admire her vision.
I will say as I try the perfume for this review again, I am left more undecided, still searching. Certainly I appreciate it. The perfume seems to ask of me to take a chance on the arty fruit, the surrealist feast of the senses. Lutens is nothing if not an artist. Today, the skies outside are grey and imposing and nearby is the warmth of Féminité du Bois. She can stay awhile longer and make an argument for her case. She can make me dérive Prague and Berlin and Warszawa endlessly, in search of that lush spiced fruit tree that will transform me into the perfect Daphne, the perfect feminine of the wood.