Fourreau Noir is a weird one; the name suggests lethal sexiness, but it smells more like cake, slightly burned still-warm cake with lavender icing that feels smooth and cold, and hard silvered-sugar dragées that crack your teeth.

It’s weird only in the name, though, because it’s an easy fougère-gourmand mix-and-match flipbook of Lutens’s greatest hits, with coumarin sweetness, light incense, fuzzy patchouli, and a smear of almond-vanilla cream damping down the sharp electrical lavender fizz. So, while your chirpy co-worker’s fancy fairy cakes might seem a bit much at ten in the morning, somehow you can manage to eat three and then go hunting about for another one in the afternoon.

Hands up who has ever used the “cashmere wrap” simile for perfume? Keep your hand up if you actually own a cashmere wrap. Yeah, me neither*. Sometimes you have to go for the obvious though. So, cake it is. 

But please, promise me that if I ever use the term “snuggly” you’ll point and laugh and threaten to confiscate all my best dinosaurs.

* No longer true, including two I knitted for myself this year (2025). I still think it’s a shit metaphor for perfume. But it doesn’t annoy me as much as “buttery” to mean smooth, soft, or pliable. Just stop it.

originally posted 7 May 2019, footnote December 2025