Serge Lutens • Vitriol d'oeillet • Fragrances

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*TOP REVIEWER* kerriki on 10/25/2012 6:19:00 AM more reviews by kerriki

Age: 56 & Over   Skin: Normal, Fair, Warm   Hair: Brunette, Wavy, Fine   Eyes: Brown    

I find this strangely haunting and beautiful. It has a peppery lift that is more than reminiscent of the carnation,apparently the theme here. Here I consider that IFRA apparently banned all the aroma chemicals that make up the carnation note, and I can only surmise that the artist perfumers decided to have a go and stick s few carnation scents up the beaurocracy because this smells so like a carnation! There is a sweetly floral note riding like a highwayman with his cloak and guns, and black Bess in the coach knowing that her lover will be pulling alongside while the moonlight comes...

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*TOP REVIEWER* mizzcindy on 6/21/2012 8:56:00 AM more reviews by mizzcindy

Age: 36-43   Skin: Combination, Fair, Cool   Hair: Blond, Wavy, Coarse   Eyes: Green    

This is actually one of the softest carnation scents I've tried. I love florals, and I love the spiciness of carnations, and this version is really really nice.
Carnation can make a fragrance smell a bit old-fashioned, but here the carnation is very subtle and there's nothing dusty about it. On me it's not sharp, I actually find this very soft and floral and the carnations give the florals a little bit of spice and creaminess, but nothing too much. It's very nice, office-friendly even.
My favourite carnation scents are: BPAL Carnation single note, Alice, LUSH Potion, Ava Luxe Oeillet Blanc, Oueillet Rouge and Madini Oeillet. They are all actually rather sweet and spicy and the SL is much more soft and wearable.
I love this, and I'll be purchasing a FB in the future.

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Necrobella on 6/12/2012 6:08:00 PM more reviews by Necrobella

Age: 36-43   Skin: Sensitive, Fair, Warm   Hair: Blond, Wavy, Medium   Eyes: Blue    

Carnation with bite. I’m not a fan of floral perfumes so this isn’t my favorite, although I greatly respect how unusual a scent it is. The clove is my favorite part about it. It’s not a clove cigarette clove, but more of a clove simmering in a caldron over an open fire in a dark coniferous forest clove combined with pungent lillies. I was wearing this whilst I went to see the movie “Prometheus” recently and now the scent permanently makes me think of aliens. In fact I think xenomorphs must smell a little like this perfume. (I don’t mean that in a bad way.) I did layer it with Datura noir and Five o'clock au gingembre once. (Honestly, what posessed me to do that?) I must say the result was positively mesmerizing, although a bit toxic. Sadly, alone it seems to not have the longevity that I am accustomed to with Serge Lutens and to be just a tad lackluster.


Notes from www.luckyscent.com: clove, carnation, wallflower, lily, ylang-ylang

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santyclaws on 12/12/2011 4:26:00 PM more reviews by santyclaws

Age: 19-24   Skin: Dry, Tan, Warm   Hair: Black, Straight, Coarse   Eyes: Brown    

Notes are very well blended. I can't stop sniffing my wrist! And everytime I do, I seem to sense a different note coming up. Cloves are pretty obvious on me, but the ladylike florals are still there. Lasts 8 hours easily.
Elegant and naughty at the same time. Uncle Serge has done it again.

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*TOP REVIEWER* ellizam on 11/25/2011 6:39:00 AM more reviews by ellizam

Age: 44-55   Skin: Combination   Hair: Brown   Eyes: Brown    

All right, first, the rest of the reviewers are crazy. Crazy! This fragrance is tormeting me. I'm trying to pare down and no-buy, but from the first sniff of this from a sample vial, it's been wearing me down. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Stunning.


One of the reviewers below actually sampled this with me, and I hope one day she amends her review to admit that on other skin (mine for instance!) this works.


To start, this is the ghost of a carnation. That's not a bad thing -- it isn't a ghost in that it's faint (far from that). It's a near carnation, an artist's impression of a carnation, the construct from alike materials of what should be a carnation but isn't quite, or an abstracted carnation.


There's a gorgeous musk in the base, and I mean, GORGEOUS. GORGEOUS!!!!! Flamingly beautiful, clean, crisp, yet soft at the same time. Over it floats a peppery/spicy note. Normally I detest pepper in fragrances but here it works, probably because it is part of a spice accord - nutmeg, allspice, brush of clove. For once, the clove in a fragrance doesn't tromp all over everything -- this really, literally, is a light brush, almost not clove at all except you catch the sweetness and then follow to the clove. Underpinning, and yet floating on top the whole, is vanilla. It isn't VANILLA, it's a soft, clear sweetness, almost marshmallow.


The ingrediants twine around each other and shift - first a spicy musk, then a peppery musk, then a spicy/peppery vanilla, then a hauntingly sweet musk... This morphs for hours. I've put barely a toothpick's worth on the back of my finger and twelve hours later am still getting soft whiffs of sweet/peppery musk. I finally caved in and bought this and I'm furious, but... it is brutally beautiful. Lutens, you're killing me.

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*TOP REVIEWER* kushka on 11/15/2011 11:29:00 AM more reviews by kushka

Age: 44-55   Skin: Other, Neutral   Hair: Other   Eyes: Other    

Uh......huh? This is Serge Lutens? First off, this is one of the weakest fragrances I've tried in a very long time. It's weak. Very. I'll give it credit for having a seamless blend of notes, though. It does not smell like anything in particular to me. If I try really hard I can sort of, almost, maybe get a carnation note, but it's so close to dead it's hard to tell. What part I do smell, identifiable or not is bland. Bland. Like an all over body mist left in a shower somewhere....for years. And years. Thumbs down.

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*TOP REVIEWER* WentworthRoth on 10/30/2011 12:01:00 PM more reviews by WentworthRoth

Age: 25-29   Skin: Combination, Fair-Medium, Warm   Hair: Blond, Wavy, Medium   Eyes: Blue    

Notes: nutmeg, clove, pink pepper, pepper and paprika.

This fragrance opens with a (genetically) engineered carnation accord. I see its typical spiciness and sweet creaminess, but a brutally synthetic fruit contains the floral like a straightjacket. The resulting accord smells like the German hard candy Gletschereis: fruity, minty, spicy and above all sugary. It is not bad per se, just not at all what I expected after reading the press release and analysing the scent's name. This carnation is not an angry thug, but rather a (pitiful) mutant. This of course matches the fragrance's tag line which references Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll. On my skin the development is rather simple: the notes gradually burn out and the scent becomes weaker and weaker as it progresses. The dry down reveals a pleasant woodsy-musky base accord, almost like fruity sandalwood. In fact I like this stage the best and I would wear Vitriol layered to mask the opening only to enjoy the dry down. I think Voyage d'Hermes would work well. Truth be told, I see a violently pungent green note as I spray the fragrance, but this effect never reaches my skin so to me I does not count. Lasts eight hours on my skin.

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*TOP REVIEWER* HelenVanPattersonPatton on 9/21/2011 6:17:00 PM more reviews by HelenVanPattersonPatton

Age: 30-35   Skin: Other   Hair: Other   Eyes: Other    

Writing the first review of a scent makes me nervous, and this one particularly so because it is a Serge that was highly anticipated prior to its release. Like a few others, I was a little disappointed. We expected Scarlett O'Hara and we got Melanie Hamilton.
The opening is spicy enough, with something slightly cool and almost bewitching. Almost. But that's the sassiest part of the scent, and there's no real power to it. No oomph. Just a little bit of carnation and clove, nutmeg, a couple of other nice little notes, which develop into something creamy about half an hour later. I'm assuming this has something to do with the ylangylang note. Anyway, when this second phase occurs, I can't help but think of a Liz Zorn fragrance (Soivohle) I have called Nightjar. There's a similarity to the middle and final phase of these two perfumes. A cold cream kind of middle which transitions into something with leather. I really like both, but the difference is that with Nightjar I wasn't expecting something totally different that what I actually experienced. A few wears from now I may come back and change my Vitriol d'oeillet rating to a 4. If it were described differently by its creator, I might have given it a 4. If it were by another company, I might have given it a 4. But after all the anticipation and several wears I think this angry carnation is really just a little irritated.

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