Nostos

Nostos by Etat Libre d’Orange

NOSTOS Where Achilles is more beautiful than Ulysses. Nostos in Greek means the return -- that which is eternally impossible, which speaks to the heart and to the imagination ; the return within the confounded space and time where hope remains. Nostos is the fundamental root of the poignant feeling called nostalgia, the pain of nostos. Here, perfume is the vehicle of the return to which one aspires in vain. Like an intense and deep incense that would have burned for three thousand years, the perfume celebrates the Homeric epic of that most beautiful of heroes, whose anger and its unpredictable consequences made the Trojan War.

The totemic figure of the desired but unfulfilled nostos is Achilles. This is not the nostos of Ulysses and his Odyssey; here, it is Achilles, the emblem of the perfume, conceived by the gods, born of love, like the Trojan war. Achilles is a complex hero with a double essence: divine through his mother, the goddess Thetis, human through his father, Peleus. He carries within him the beauty of duality, sometimes a fearsome warrior with powerful and penetrating musks – the extreme virility of the Oud without which Troy cannot be defeated – and sometimes the femininity of the rose. Achilles is the violence and beauty found in the extraordinary diversity of humanity.

Spear or shield, this perfume too has a double nature, where the Greek hero is adorned with the attractions of jasmine and sandalwood. Art of war or love, the perfume approaches perfection in order to attack time, fight against our limited destinies and finally triumph over the merciless Greek gods with amber, saffron and incense. Achilles will never return to his homeland. He knows this, and fights against this destiny, always torn by the desire of return, haunted by this pitiful weapon against fatality, by this nostalgia in which we see his humanity triumph. The scent of the most beautiful Greek hero, fragile and dangerous, forged by Hephaestus, the god of fire, to ensure victory.