No. I
Eau de parfum · 75 ml
The scent
It opens like a cherry bitten in the dark: black, glossy, a little sour at the stone.
Saffron runs through it like a thread of warm metal, and pink pepper catches at the back of the throat, the way a name does when you have not said it in years.
Then the room changes. Jasmine, the kind that only opens after sunset. Orange blossom from a garden you can hear but not see. A glass of bourbon left on the windowsill, still holding the last of the light. Under all of it, something green and a little wild: angelica root, which the old apothecaries kept on their shelves against poison.
Hours later, what stays is skin. Caramel taken one breath past golden, just before it burns. Vanilla, and a warm tree resin of the kind old churches burned. A musk so close it reads as your own. Whoever leans in gets the last of it.
black cherry · saffron · pink pepper · jasmine sambac · orange blossom · bourbon · angelica root · caramel · vanilla · Siam resin · skin musk
The flacon
It is cut, set and closed by hand, and there are not many of them.
The cage is Lacrima crystal: glass given more facets than it needs, so that in a dim room it finds the one light there is and gives it back to you. The crown is fluted like a chapel roof. The amber inside is the perfume itself.
We make it in runs small enough that we know where every one of them went. Refill it and keep it. Most of them will outlive the scent they came with.
Rose gold
A leaf of rose gold drifts in the amber. It stays in the flacon; only the scent leaves it.
Its blush is copper. The Egyptians kept their drinking water in copper to keep it clean, and the alchemists gave copper to Venus: her sign, the circle over the cross, was the sign for the metal. Jewellers in nineteenth-century Russia mixed it into gold, and the colour has belonged to lovers ever since.
The amethyst
A raw amethyst sits inside, uncut, as it left the rock.
The Greeks called it amethystos, not drunk, and believed it kept a clear head however much wine was poured. We chose it for a smaller reason: by candlelight it turns the colour of the last minute of dusk.
What touches your skin
We chose every material for how it wears on skin, not for how cheaply it fills a bottle. Every ingredient is written on the box, the fragrance allergens too, and no flacon leaves us before it has been assessed for safety under UK cosmetics law.
£395
La Fontana Two free refills come with the flacon. Terms