Gris Clair: the shades of grey

The color grey. Is it a perfect balance in the world of colors when none of them is dominating and all of them are the same? Or is it a result of eternal contest between the light and the darkness who reached their compromise in grey? Is it a color at all? Or just a shade? Or a shadow?

Gris Clair by Serge Lutens could be the answer to those questions. Smelling it reveals a beautiful picture in grey to my mind. I see seashore on a grey day with taupe coloured sand, steel blue water, dark arsenic tinted clouds on the horizon and slate rocks covered with xanadu coloured moss. I observe the glowing embers covered with ashes in a silver censer and sense the silent calmness of the world around me. I burn some incense consisted of dusty sweet exotic resins and greyish lavender blossoms and inhale the scent to complete the ritual...

Serge Lutens is always very laconic, but also precise describing his perfumes on his website. “Lavender dust” – it’s all what you read there. No fragrant pyramid. But if I could make one myself it would look like the following:

Top notes: The calming freshness of lavender blossoms. All shades of grey from smoked mauve to slate grey.

Heart notes: The sweetness of lavender absolute filled with the warmth of ambery notes and strengthened with bitter coumarinic sweetness of Tonka beans.

Base notes: The bitterness of lavender ash, the dust of crushed lavender herb, metallic coldness and the loneliness of moss on a grey rock.

I love to wear Gris Clair on a grey day to remind myself that grey doesn’t have to be sad. It’s interesting to see that lavender perfume can be simple, but elegant and sophisticated. I love the feeling of calmness I get wearing this scent. And I really love the compliments I get when people notices the trail of Gris Clair. Sometimes it’s funny to see them a little bit confused as they smell something very familiar, but something they can’t recognize in a glimpse…