ETAT LIBRE D'ORANGE - LIKE THIS BY TILDA SWINTON - 50ML. Women's fragrance

"I have never been a one for scents in bottles.

I have always located my favourite fragrances at the doorways of kitchens, in the heart of a greenhouse, at the bottom of a garden. Scent means place to me : place and state of mind - even state of grace. Certainly state of ease. My favourite smells are the smells of home, the experience of the reliable recognisable after the exotic adventure: the regular - natural - turn of the seasons, simplicity and softness after the duck and dive of definition in the wide, wide world.

When  Mathilde Bijaoui first asked me what my own favourite scent in a bottle might contain, I described a magic potion that I could carry with me wherever I went  that would hold for me the fragrance - the spirit - of home. The warm ginger of new baking on a wood table, the immortelle of a fresh spring afternoon, the lazy  sunshine of my grandfather's summer greenhouse, woodsmoke and the whisky peat of the Scottish Highlands after rain.  I told her about a bottle of spirit, something  very simple, to me : something almost indescribable, so personal it should be. The miracle is that Mathilde made it.

The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote :

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,


or what "God’s fragrance" means,


lean your head toward him or her.
 

Keep your face there close.

Like this.

This is possibly my favourite poem of all time.

It restores me like the smoke/rain/gingerbread/ greenhouse my scent-sense is fed by. It is a poem about simplicity, about human-scaled miracles.  About trust.  About home.

In my fantasy there is a lost chapter of Alice in Wonderland - after the drink saying Drink Me, after the cake pleading Eat Me - where the adventuring, alien, Alice, way down the rabbit hole, far from the familiar and maybe somewhat homesick - comes upon a modest glass with a ginger stem reaching down into a pale golden scent that humbly suggests : Like This…"

Composition: Yellow tangerine, ginger, immortelle flower, Moroccan Neroli, Grasse rose, vetyver, heliotrope, musks...