House Parfum d'Empire
Released 2021
Perfumer Marc-Antoine Corticchiato
Fragrance Family Chypre
Notes Corsican wild organic inula, nettle absolute, bramble, thistle, iris roots

Description “In French, weeds are called ‘mauvaises herbes’-bad herbs. I think it’s unfair, because they are bountiful and have many healthful properties- like inula or nettle, for instance. I’ve never had the heart to pull out the wild inula that grows in my garden in the heart of the maquis.”- Marc-Antoine Corticchiato.

Banks, hillsides, ravines, and wastelands. You see them everywhere. Smell them nowhere. No fragrance celebrates them. And yet, they are fragrant, those plants we call weeds, because they are unwanted. 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- known to botanists as inula graveolens- 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, and 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.

50 ml extrait de parfum spray
$125.00

1 ml extrait de parfum sample
$6.00