Cuir de Nuit
Saffron, styrax, birch tar
- Composed by
- Théo Vasseur
- Family
- Leather
- Formula written
- 2018
- From
- €92.00
Cuir de Nuit
Saffron, styrax, birch tar
How it was built
Leather is not a material. There is no leather oil; there never was. What perfumery calls leather is a set of accords assembled out of birch tar, styrax, saffron and quinolines, and each house builds its own.
Ours starts with saffron, which reads as leather to almost everyone before they can name why -- the safranal in it shares a metallic, hay-like facet with tanned hide. Styrax gives the balsamic body, birch tar the char, and osmanthus a suede softness at the edge.
It is the darkest thing we make and the one most often bought in the ten millilitre size first.
How it wears
Four properties, read on skin over a full day rather than on a blotter. They describe behaviour, not preference.
Sillage
Fills a room
Longevity
Into the next day
Temperature
Warm and resinous
Density
Fully stacked
These are the atelier’s own readings, taken on skin rather than on a blotter, and they describe how the fragrance behaves rather than how much anyone liked it.
Head, heart and base
The materials that determine each stage, in the order they own it. The bars are compositional weight within a tier, not a percentage of the formula; the formula itself is not published.
Head
The most volatile materials. They are what you smell as the alcohol flashes off, and they are gone inside twenty minutes.
SaffronCrocus sativus
Black pepperPiper nigrum
BergamotCitrus bergamia
Heart
The body of the composition. It emerges as the head clears and holds for two to four hours; this is the fragrance as it is meant to be recognised.
StyraxLiquidambar orientalis
Osmanthus absoluteOsmanthus fragrans
Immortelle absoluteHelichrysum italicum
Base
The least volatile materials, and the ones that fix the rest in place. What is left on skin at the end of the day, and on cloth for days after.
Birch tar, rectifiedBetula pendula
Quinoline leather accord
Tonka beanDipteryx odorata
Materials and provenance
Where the principal materials come from and how they are won from the plant. Every lot behind a given bottle is recorded against its flacon code.
SaffronCrocus sativus
Khorasan, Iran
Ethanol extraction of stigmas, then tincture at ten percent
Around one hundred and fifty thousand flowers make a kilogram of dry stigma. We buy the material as thread and tincture it ourselves so we can control the strength.
StyraxLiquidambar orientalis
Muğla, Türkiye
Bark exudate, steam distilled and rectified
Collected from wounded trunks in a forest that is now protected. Supply is capped by law rather than by demand, which is the correct order.
Size and price
Each size is filled from the same batch. The ten millilitre format is not a sample; it is the same juice in a smaller flacon.
€92.00
10 ml eau de parfum · reference NOC-CDN-010
Bottles are filled to order from the current batch and dispatched within five working days. Fragrance cannot be returned once the seal is broken; an unopened flacon may be returned within fourteen days.