Description
Artaban by Astier de Villatte
Les Trois Parfums Historiques Collection
30ml Eau de Parfum
Olfactive Family – Floral | Amber (Oriental) | Classical
Perfume Author – Dominique Ropion
Artaban is hailed for the incredible lavishness of its formula, no less than twenty-four raw materials (serichatum, costus, cassia, styrax….) imported at great expense from the most distant lands. This “royal perfume”, originally created for the Parthian kings, was highly coveted by wealthy Romans. They could not get enough of it, enthusiastically soaking themselves with it at every opportunity, as was the fashion of the time.
Reinterpreted by Dominique Ropion, Artaban is a pure concentrate of the wonders of the plant universe. We get to delight in its heady scents – bitter sweet marjoram with its small, green, rounded leaves exhaling a delicious aroma; cardamom with a spicy, aniseed tang fruity note, like a bracing gust of wind: cistus labdanum, whose white flowers adorned with crimson dots gave it the name ‘tears of Christ’; sweet vanilla amber, with its scent of incense: and warm cinnamon, humanity’s most ancient spice. Artaban is filled with earthy, resinous and woody accords, and green and herbaceous calamus with multiple fragrant facets.
Scent Profile of Marjoram, Cardamom, Cistus Labdanum, Vanilla, Amber, Cinnamon
A book comes with each box purchased. Printed on the Astier de Villatte typographic presses, it retraces the epic story of the three historic perfumes. Bilingual texts in French and English by Annick Le Guérant, Sophie Mazeaud and Lionel Paillès. An interview with the Astier de Villatte team and perfumer Dominique Ropion completes this book. Illustrated by the artist Eva Jospin.
Les Trois Parfums Historiques: Le Dieu Bleu, Artaban, Les Nuits. These perfumes are the result of a meeting between Ivan Pericoli and Benoît Astier de Villatte, the creators of Astier de Villatte, Dominique Ropion, perfumer, and Annick Le Guérer, perfume historian, anthropologist and researcher. All of them driven by the same passion: to restore the prestige of three mythical and magnificent fragrances — Le Dieu bleu (Egyptian kyphi), Artaban (the Roman “royal perfume”), Les Nuits (the perfume of George Sand) — by reconstituting as closely as possible the formulas of the time according to the regulations of today’s perfumery.
Star perfumer at IFF, Dominique Ropion pulled out all the stops in the reconstitution of these three formulas, a perilous exercise considering their richness and complexity. His close collaboration of more than twenty years with Annick Le Guérer was the starting point of the project. The historian provided him with precise documents for the first two perfumes, right down to recipes and the proportions of each ingredient, as well as dregs from the bottom of a travel phial of George Sand’s perfume, entrusted by one of her descendants, Christiane Sand. Ingredients which no longer complied with and are prohibited by current perfumery standards had to be adapted or replaced with substitutes. State-of-the-art technology and innovation made this artistic and technical challenge possible.
These three fragrances were produced at the Atelier du Parfumeur in Grasse using 100% natural raw materials, essences and concretes, as well as new aromas
