VANILLE HAVANE

Through Lie’s artistry, Vanille Havane becomes a 3D interpretation of vanilla as an intoxicating fragrance with facets of rum, dried fruits, cocoa, cigar, and dark florals that reverberate on an ambery leather base. 

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Notes: Vanilla ‘mauvais’ Comoros, Cocoa Colombia, Jasmine Egypt. 

Vanilla is a mythical spice, one of the most precious and expensive extracts in the perfumer’s palette. But it’s been used in perfumery primarily as an addition to other floral accords or with an emphasis on a one-dimensional cliché of confectionary sweetness audiences are familiar with through the cheap, synthetic ingredient vanillin. 

Vanille Havane takes you on a journey instead through the multiple olfactory facets of a premium, gourmet grade black vanilla bean, revealing the depths and layers of this important and complex perfume ingredient. Think of Vanille Havane as an artistic, immersive Virtual Reality trip through the vanilla bean itself. 

“When you take a vanilla bean, cut it, and smell it, the scent is very complex,” says Antoine Lie. “So with Vanille Havane, the idea was not just to do a typical candied sweet vanilla, the artificial flavor everyone is familiar with. Instead, I wanted to reveal all the rich facets in the bean, so I pushed the rum, cocoa, spices (clove, cinnamon, cardamom) tobacco, woods, floral and leathery facets of the natural vanilla bean scent.”

Vanille Havane benefits from Les Indémodables access to incredibly sourced ingredients extracted at Atelier Français des Matière’s lab using innovative green techniques that result in ingredients with exquisitely specific qualities.

It includes a powerful and animalic jasmine extract from AFDM that was obtained by distilling Indian jasmine concrete with water instead of the usual alcohol to create an essence rather than an absolute. A Columbian cacao with an intense dark chocolate and balsamic profile was designed using a green solvent along with ultrasound technology, whose low temperature extraction helps to preserve the full spectrum of cacao’s olfactive profile. And a Grande Comores vanilla extract was produced for its confectionary qualities. 

Vanille Havane is Antoine Lie’s first foray into composing a fragrance centered on only one ingredient, but its masterful and smooth interpretation of the complex olfactive contrasts and complements of each of the vanilla bean’s many facets is the opposite of a typical linear fragrance. 

The idea that abstraction in perfumery represents an evolution of the simplistic, single-ingredient inspired perfume of the 19th century gets deconstructed in Vanille Havane. 

“With Vanille Havane, Antoine Lie and Les Indémodables return to the roots of perfumery with its emphasis on a single ingredient,” says Valérie Pulvérail, founder of Les Indémodables. “But because he’s using a modern palette of ingredients, Lie isn’t mimicking the natural vanilla bean as much as he is interpreting it, magnifying certain facets, revealing their connections, while being careful that no one facet masks another. This creative balancing act in interpreting one ingredient is something totally new in perfume creation.” 

If you’d like genuine olfactive odyssey through the vanilla bean, then Les Indemodables’ incredible new fragrance Vanille Havane is your one-way ticket in a bottle. 

In Vanille Havane by Les Indémodables, perfumer Antoine Lie celebrates the singular ingredient vanilla by taking you on an immersive Virtual Reality journey through its olfactive complexity. 

With an emphasis not on the one-dimensional confectionary sweetness many vanilla fragrances highlight but rather on the authentic vanilla bean’s dark richness, Vanille Havane becomes Lie’s interpretation of vanilla as an intoxicating fragrance with facets of rum, dried fruits, cocoa, cigar, and dark florals that reverberate on an ambery leather base.