Perfume review - Serge Lutens Ambre Sultan - Christopher Sheldrake; 1993

I’m pretty sure our first encounter was at a perfumery in Nice. It was part of a large Lutens display — an austere assembly of those slim, rectangular bottles, with the unassumingly serious typeface on the labels. Although at this point in time, we were well into the twenty-first century, I confess I knew next to nothing about the brand: Uncle Serge’s concoctions hadn’t yet made their way over to the Middle East so I hadn’t had many chances to sniff them. Naturally, I was intrigued by what I saw before me — the gothic darkness of the aesthetic, all those images of pungent ingredients, the lack of knowledge about this mysterious Monsieur Lutens. And how were we supposed to pronounce that word anyway? Was the final ‘s’ silent or not? In what was probably a moment of facetiousness, the bottle I chose to start with was Ambre Sultan. Why on earth is a name like that, I asked myself, being used by what is almost certainly a European brand, in the 2000s? But then I sprayed the stuff — and words failed me.