While the young King Louis XIV used oud to scent his linen, this hallowed essence stems from the Orient. The king of woods and the wood of kings, today it is worth more than gold. It is the embodiment of the most luxurious elixir, of the most mystical energy that radiates between the earthly realm and heaven.

In the most advanced medieval Arab-Muslim civilisations lived the “Ẓurafā”: a group that represented the height of sophistication. Brilliant both in their humanist thinking and in the sumptuous fabrics they wore, they left behind them the nostalgia of a perfume as fine as leather and as cosy as down. The pinnacle of refinement!

The legend of Sidi Bel-Abbès – for a long time a garrison town and headquarters of the Foreign Legion – still runs through the veins of Serge Lutens. This is his way of keeping its memory alive: blazing sun, white sand, hot tobacco and the stirrings of a romance over before it began.

A smouldering ode to the personality of a woman who dares to do anything. Wherever there is trouble, she is always the one holding the match. Like the rose in this fragrance, she is cut from a cloth of petals intertwined with the sharpest thorns. Fiery, uncompromising, unforgettable.

To resurrect the transcendence and sacredness of ecstasy, Serge Lutens leads the senses in a mesmerizing dance of opulent Turkish rose blended with precious oud, embellished with cedarwood and candied fruit. Teeming with splendour, Serge Lutens chose to name this creation “Tarab” in yet another homage to the perfumes of Arabia.