Mal-Aimé

Embankments, mountain slopes, crevices and wastelands. You see them everywhere. You smell them nowhere. No perfume honours them. And yet they are fragrant, these herbs called weeds because no one plants them. Because they grow on their own, spontaneous, carefree, hardy, untameable. Disdained by mankind, like those marginal beings, the overlooked ones who fiercely conceal their nobility out of modesty, or because they ask nothing of anyone...

It is to finally do justice to these wild herbs banished from flacons and fine neighbourhoods that Marc-Antoine Corticchiato offers them Mal-Aimé. An iconoclastic fragrance because it runs counter to a perfumery that claims only noble materials, Mal-Aimé draws inspiration from a common plant with a rare essence, one entirely unprecedented in perfumery.
Fragrant inula – Inula graveolens to botanists – bristles its tousled yellow flower clusters across every corner of Corsica. Its essential oil, distilled from plants harvested in the maquis – and certified organic – represents a true treasure for the perfumer. Over the hours, this emerald-green essence unfolds facets of extraordinary generosity.

Herbaceous? One might have guessed, given the nature of the thing. But inula borrows its scent from the rose and its sweetness from honey. Does it feel as sunny as the colour of its flowers? It also reveals itself to be woody, salty, musky. Around this beautiful and rebellious unknown, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato summons the entire procession of the unloved – thistles, nettles, brambles and roots – to pay tribute once more to his native Corsica. Disconcerting, avant-garde, never smelled before… Naturally noble. Inevitably iconoclastic. A perfume like no other.

The perfumer's words: a perfume dedicated to a companion of the maquis and the scrubland "Weeds: I think that is an unjust term, because they are often beneficial and can possess health-giving virtues, like inula or nettle. I have never had the heart to remove the wild inula plants growing in my garden in the middle of the maquis."

This Mal-Aimé is a tribute to friendship. The essence used by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato is distilled by Stéphane and Alexandre Acquarone, sons of Lucien Acquarone, "my companion through the maquis and the scrubland, from Corsica to Vietnam by way of Madagascar and La Réunion", recounts the perfumer. An engineer specialising in the manufacture of plant extraction units, "Lucien was a magician who could bring out the best of their scents without altering their original fragrance, always as close to nature as possible."

This adventurer, "capable of setting off from one day to the next to the other side of the world for some crazy project"
shared with Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, in addition to a love of gastronomy, wines and fragrant plants, a deep fondness for inula – "this plant with such a particular scent, yet rejected by all. For many, many years we would often evoke it, telling ourselves that we had to make the fragrance of this 'weed' with its so singular personality known. But he left too soon." Mal-Aimé, a perfume brimming with inula essence from the Corsican harvests of his sons, is therefore "a wink to Lucien. Lucien who, from up above, must be chuckling, glass in hand, with a green and sparkling eye. Green like the essence of inula and sparkling like his favourite champagne."

Alcohol Denat., Parfum (fragrance), Aqua (water), Benzyl salicylate, Hydroxycitronellal, Eugenol, Methyl 2-Octyonate, Linalool, Limonene, Citronellol, Geraniol, Farnesol, Citral, Benzyl benzoate, Benzyl alcohol, Cinnamal