Le Participe Passé

Smells like burnt caramel or maple syrup? Caramel macchiato and a chocolate pastry? Hahaha, it smells more like fenugreek to me. And there’s the usual Serge Lutens blend of cumin and caraway, camphor and herbs. Don’t expect any sweet dessert gourmand notes at all. It smells like heavily burnt spices and balsam.

I blind bought this after weeks of considering this and other fragrances. I can say after my first impressions of it, it smells like an Indian man's sweaty curry smell mixed with black licorice and maybe a little burnt sugar. I am dissapointed and slightly annoyed, considering the smell from the open bottle when putting the atomizer on smelled like a nice spiced caramel, of which I get none on my skin and in the air. I did lots of research before blind buying this, and only saw 1 review that said it smells like curry. Clearly people like this, but it is certainly not for me and I'm dissapointed for now

Wow...so far it's like being in a bakery with fresh baked bread in the air, while enjoying a caramel macchiato and a chocolate pastry...but somehow you're also in the middle of a field of herbs in the summer at the same time. Classic Serge! Definitely a collector’s piece for Serge fans, but it isn't for your run-of-the-mill mass-appealing crowd. I'm super glad I picked this up!

There are so many conflicting reviews about this fragrance, and then I found out it has been discontinued. That only made me want to experience it even more 🥹 So… I ordered a full bottle! Now I can’t wait for it to arrive so I can finally give it a proper wear and see what all the fuss is about. A very cozy, warm, and soft fragrance. It has a beautiful sweetness that is never cloying, it’s smooth, comforting, and gently enveloping. At the same time, the composition is beautifully balanced by a subtle touch of bitterness, which becomes especially noticeable when you smell the area where the fragrance has been applied. Although the fragrance feels rich and dense, it wears with remarkable airiness. It never feels heavy, overwhelming, or tiring. Another unexpected aspect is a distinct coffee nuance that I clearly perceive. Most likely, this is simply the way the composition develops on my skin. It adds a unique charm to the fragrance, making it even more intriguing and multidimensional. To me, this isn’t a fragrance that tries to make a loud statement. It’s calm, refined, and beautifully well-composed. Rather than wearing it to impress those around you, it’s a fragrance you wear for your own enjoyment. My bottle is from 2018.

Salty Black Balsam I absolutely hated this the first time I tried it. Now, I truly love it! The opening has an aromatic feel you have to pass: a pine forest under darkness, green blueish needles, trees swaying calmly, night. This almost oldschool fougére-leaning moment is nice enough, but actually my least favorite part. All of the pine notes fade in about one hour or less and then, the heart of Le Participé Passé is fully in focus: Black oozing, gooey, salty licorice balsam! I think LPP is first and foremost a salty fragrance. Dark, sticky and molasses-like in smell and percieved texture. With an overdose of molecules found in maple syrup, fenugreek and brown sugar, it's quite extreme. The "caramel" note is not sweet at all, not really burnt either, but as dark as it can get before turning bitter. Regardless of the treats one tends to think of, Participé never sweetens. It stays a dark, balsamic "amber" of warm molasses, jujubees, and dates, licorice root (no anise). The lack of sweetness makes Le Participe Passé a rather unconventional and difficult to place within either the amber or gourmand category. I'm happy I got a bottle of this since it's now discontinued. It will last quite a while because 1-2 sprays is usually more than enough and it stays on for a long time. I love it on sunwarmed skin, especially on summer evenings in golden light.

There must be inconsistencies in different batches, because I really struggle to recognise any of the other reviews. My bottle is caramel on steroids, like crème brûlée piping hot. No other ingredient stands a chance to come through. Performance is insane. One spray takes over my whole being and the entire room for hours. Beware!

Le Participe Passe opens with an aromatic and balsamic caramel. Lightly Spiced and vanillic. Cumin is a very very scary note for many people, but it is not something that should worry here. I dont get a straightforward Cumin note, but more of a savory feel to the resinous and sweet note. I would have loved to see this with a floral component like jasmine or rose even. But all in all this is a rich fragrance.

Artemisia smells awful on me. Smells also like old books in my family library but this time the smell of the library is amplified by 10 times. I swear I can’t get other notes until after 5 minutes … a slight vanilla mixed with amber in whiffs because artemisia refused to let them shine. Not for me. A scrubber

Ah it’s glorious. Rich and elegant with a perfect balance of some sharpness from artemisia in contrast with the balsams and touch of caramel at the base. Perfect cold weather scent that just warms you up from the inside. Worth hunting down a bottle.

awesome note pyramid but apparently discontinued...

Smells like sappy pine trees with fresh green spices. I don't have many occasions to wear this on skin but I've been spraying it in my leather bag so when I open it, I can enjoy the scent throughout the day.

This doesn't smell like a perfume but like someone else's cherished memory. I'm at a reading desk in a large, old, impossibly high-ceilinged library. Dust particles dance through shafts of sunlight. I can smell the leather of old books and the faint mustiness of decades-old carpet. I'm in the company of thoughts that have already been thought, waiting for new thoughts of my own to take shape. This is sun-dust and old books in perfume form. Also: caramel, leather, cumin, pepper. Personally, I love it. It's cozy, warm, sweet, and just a little mysterious. I usually like to sit with scents for at least a few weeks, or months, before buying a FB, but I pounced on the first bottle I found. No regrets.

I don't know why, but on my skin this scent opened with a punch of cumin :D I thought it's supposed to come later... Smells like cooking something nice haha. Doubt I'll actually wear it though as I don't get any resins on my skin, just the spices and caramel.

As anyone who has read many of my reviews and can recall them, immemorable they might be, they will know that I'm worn out on ambers. We've been on this ride for the better part of a century from Emeraude and Shalimar to where we are today, with countless numbers on our retail perfume shelves and too many that are awful, thick, bulbous, sweet, muddy messes of splintery balsams and sickly vanilla. Serge Lutens and Sheldrake almost reinvented the wheel with Ambre Sultan, one of my favorite ambers of all time, and it seems with Le Participe Passe they're making another attempt. So, I steel myself in anticipation of smelling yet another amber, but it's from Lutens so I don't feel the need to steel myself too much. Although, I suspect a ruse. It wouldn’t be the first time Serge tries to trick us, and I think he hints at it in the name, The Past Participle. This smells to me like a mash-up of the past, Ambre Sultan with some serious borrowing from Chene and Fille en Aiguilles (and maybe some of Chergui too). Place those three/four on a Venn diagram and where they meet in the middle is Le Participe Passe. There is more than enough Ambre Sultan in Participe to see the overlap of the spices, patchouli, vanilla, resins and balsams. Where LPP deviates from AS in the amber genre is that LPP has a massive overdose of sweet labdanum (sort of calling to mind Chergui) that wasn't nearly as big and sweet in AS. This has the effect of steering away from the very dry, herbal and sandy quality of Ambre Sultan into a gourmand direction. The immortelle and boozy rum type notes from Chene compliment the directional change, and the dried and sweet fruit and resinous evergreen sap from Fille nearly complete the picture of LPP. One final and last difference to LPP compared to the others is its size and volume: this is a big, loud, and bold perfume. It will completely take over your skin, fill the room around you, and hang around for hours and hours. Be careful applying this perfume; less is more at the start until you figure out how it works for you. Big, bold, and loud though it is, on my skin - though maybe not yours - it isn't crowding me; it isn't cloying or impenetrably thick. I dare say I could actually wear this loud and bold gourmand amber in the summer (if I do, I will take my own advice and start with very small amounts). So, is LPP a bit derivative then? Yeah, maybe. It seems like maybe a half-hearted attempt at a new type of gourmand amber. But where it succeeds is pulling some of the greatest hits from Serge Lutens's woody spicy amber perfumes over the decades, and, rather than being a compilation album of stand-alone tracks, it's actually well thought-out, remixed, and remastered so that the greatest hits album feels like it could be a completely new album full of hit tracks. Gourmand is not my thing. Amber is not my thing. Sweet is not my thing. And yet, I'm really loving LPP. Do I want to splurge on a full bottle or just layer some of the other SLs?... Haven't made up my mind on that yet.

I may have written a review for this before, but I recently rediscovered it in my collection. This is more than just a perfume for me—it’s like a vibe or an aura. The caramel is very wistful, it’s sort of like the smell of actually making caramel sauce with brown sugar and butter. It sticks close to the skin like that, while the resins remind me of a church or a temple, like incense and varnish and dry wood. The artemisia is very green, vegetal, and ethereal, expertly tying the fragrance together. It’s like being in a warmly lit little cafe in the middle of the night, all brown sugar and book spines. Could be worn anywhere by any gender, but I think it might really shine in the fall. If I had to pair it with a scent already in my collection, I’d say it goes nicely with Replica Whispers in the Libary by Maison Margiela. Lasts hours and hours (and months on my coat!) projection is close to you, but not a skin scent.

Something about green-gourmand translates in my head as magic. Happened for me more vaguely with Eau Duelle, and now very pointedly with Le Participe Passe. I'll save the details for a short story, suffice to say this one doesn't stop at stories, it creates whole damn worlds. Lutens is possibly the most quality house I've tried-- everything is rich and real and interesting, but this one speaks directly to my DNA. It's magic. Distilled into liquid and somehow available to just... buy. This is the first time I've considered how crazy that is. Like, does the FDA regulate freaking magic now?

very much agree with the review below me. this is an awesome blend with a perfect juxtaposition of sweet and balsamic, its quite deep and complex.

iconic and beautiful serge lutens perfume, le participe passe is probably my favorite balsamic perfume at the moment: in the opening you get this really deep resin and balsam note, that almost reminds me of coffee or liquorice; after a while the resin softens and reveals a creamy and sticky caramel base, sweet but not too much, while the deep liquorice-like balsam note evolves into a deep leathery base. definitely the most mature and unique caramel perfume ive smelled so far, so sad that they discontinued it… 10/10

Uncle Serge seems very decent, but he is a serial killer...of the contents of the wallet and of the soul...or vice versa if you want it that way. And it also has a co-author in the person of Christopher Sheldrake. I managed to test any of their creations, it left me with likes and loves. This masterpiece starts quite herbaceous-aromatic and seems to tend towards a masculine perfume. But nope ! Immediately the resins perfectly combined with burnt sugar, not too burnt because it retains some of its sweetness, will become predominant turning the perfume into a "feminine unisex", yes?! It lasts for good hours with a strong projection. It changes a second time in the base, when the resins fade into the background, giving way to a pine wood accord so natural that you have the impression that you have a freshly split pine log in your hands. Man, the perfume is so beautiful that words seem incapable of truly describing it. Test and see for yourself. 5 of 5, 10 of 10? More... :)

so unique, delightful and jammy, dried figs covered in a dark caramel sauce. incredible performance as usual with Serge.

resinous bomb with a blast of pepper in the opening and a sweeter dry down, truly a nuclear fragrance both in its nature and performance

Serge Lutens is my favourite fragrance house, and when it comes to things I love, I’m fanatical. Admitting defeat doesn’t come easy to me. When I unpacked my decant of Le Participe Passé, I was on the verge of calling this a mistake on not just my part for getting so much as a decant, but also, uncharacteristically, on the house’s part for creating something so sloppy in vision and execution. If ever more proof that bottle sniffs are meaningless were needed, this would be the perfect evidence: all around the bottle hung a heavy scent of caramel popcorn, sickeningly sweet to the point just the thought of this on me was dreadful. But being the brave perfume enthusiast that I am, I sacrificed my wrist… turns out, to a unique, intoxicating, addictive experience. The first blast was an aromatic men’s cologne, but within an instant two things happened: the alcohol scent that is the hallmark of such cologne disappeared into thin air, and the sweet base came in full force. Just like that, Le Participe Passé became two separate perfumes simultaneously. On top sits the slightly bitter aromatic blend. I love the descriptor “fresh spicy” for it, because there’s a bite to its freshness, which clears your airways and snakes itself down to the back of your throat. This is a pleasant experience, although unmistakably masculine. Below something slightly, subjectively off-putting is happening. I do not like the scents that are appearing and mixing. These are the things I do not enjoy: maple syrup pooling on the plate, grounds burning inside as the machine squirts watery coffee into a cup. It’s the breakfast from hell. But no, there’s something synthetic missing from this mixture, something I know I smelled in my childhood but cannot pinpoint. So begins my chase after the elusive key to deciphering what it is that I’m smelling. I glimpse scenes from my childhood, the terrible pine shaped car scent, that feels close but the answer flees once again. Was it when I was playing with dolls with a friend? I remember the layout of her Mum’s living room, there must have been something there. But what? I have no idea. It smells waxy. Two distinct fragrances keep unfolding separately. Now the maple is moving towards the top, it’s becoming a forest. Below, dates are being cut open. They’re sticky inside, waxy. Wax. That ought to be the synthetic note I feel. I’m dizzy. The wax is disgusting, but not only that, I’m trapped inside a Proust nightmare: my brain is flipping through images, scenes, possible answers. What is it that I’m really smelling? The answer is all the farther away than the reach of my grasp, now that there are spices unfolding. This hunt and the fact that I sprayed just one perfume, yet there are, without a doubt, two different perfumes developing are disorientating. The world spins fast, I see images of a spice bazaar, I remember Arabie, my favourite perfume ever, just a blast of a spice market; Arabie… Wait, no, the more I dwell on this remembrance, the faster I’m losing my obsessive track. I cannot be swept away, and yet, and yet… I see two visions: the dank, dark, misty forest on top; below I’m a wanderer in the desert. I reach for the dates, put several in my mouth, I bite on them… and they’re half-molten wax, not dates, but a candle, filling my mouth with a chemical taste. I feel sick. And then I land on the answer, so suddenly, so abruptly that I feel suspended in the air. I know where I know this smell from. It’s a fall candle in Bath and Body Works. I’m little, a child who’s excited for the freshly opened store. I love candles, I have my pocket money, and a goal: I will smell everything, and find the perfect candle to take home, to make mine. I reach for the fall candle, and it smells nothing like it’s supposed to, it’s all synthetic, it’s all sickening… The moment the realisation hits as if a thunder, more revelations: I know what is happening with Le Participe Passé, and why. First of all, yes, it’s magic. How is it possible to achieve two separate perfumes developing separately within the same bottle? This is master perfumery. This is unmatched. And this is so apt: two different timelines, eventually converging, melting into each other, forming a whole… The forest is Lille: Lutens’ home of origin. The desert is Marrakech: the home he chose. This is Serge’s past meeting his present, bottled. Gradually, the forest turns into pencil shavings, falling on top of the dates, off which the wax melts, taking its unpleasant memory with it. Now the two perfumes have converged, and they’re one. It’s the present, shaped by the past. The past, intruding upon the present: dates enveloped by burning woods. There’s a fire in the woods. There’s a fire in the desert. Smoke fills the cold, humid night. The dates are sweet, so fleshy and so sweet. You should be choking, for the smoke fills your nostrils, the sugar your mouth. There’s a sharpness in your throat; a perfect roundness in your mouth. You’re holding the memories of what has been, and all the dualities of life. Of identity. Of yourself. Of fact and fiction. An ever-changing fragrance for an ever-changing reality. A perfume in flux for the person in flux. Spice, smoke, camphor, sugar, cacao, dusty castoreum in constant rotation, endless transmutation. You cannot pinpoint the scent, you cannot pinpoint yourself. Who are you? What is it? Quantum beings in the amalgamation of space and time. Le Participe Passé is poetry written in redolence. The sort of masterpiece that weakens you, that breaks something and liberates another within your core; the sort of art before which you cannot help but fall to your knees...

Herbal bitters and spice over dry nutty caramel resins Le Participe Passe is a stunning scent, very different to what I expected but nonetheless one of the few scents out there that really made me question my whole perception of perfumery. Starting with the elephant in the room, cumin, if you don’t like it or generally worry about the musty sweaty elements it often displayed, do NOT immediately be put off by it’s inclusion in the note pyramid. While it is there, it only really sits in the forefront for half an hour or so. So if Epice Marine or Declaration are too much for you there still is a chance you can tolerate this one. The opening is stunning. There is something about the underlying nutty sweetness and intensely roasted spice and almost burnt yet creamy labdanum/resin that immediately reminds me of freshly ground dark roasted coffee. 5 minutes later the coffee mirage is gone and we are in a spice filled pestle and mortar with added date syrup and dry bitter herbals. Now this is where the cumin might overwhelm some, especially because of the strong performance, where you might start pit sniffing, but if you can endure the first 30 mins you are up for a treat. Underneath the cumin cloud lies the wonderful fantastical evocation of Egyptian resins. Dense and narcotic labdanum-like mixed with dry and hot desert sand, herbaceous and spiced oriental air transport you to a distance past. Very unique experience, definitely worth waiting through the slightly awkward cumin maple syrup stage. I’m very happy to have blind bought a 50 ml a few years ago, wish it had been a 100ml. Challenging yet uniquely beautiful and aptly named. Nothing other than the even less accessible Arabie compares.

sticky sweet resin, and very autumnal. definitely sample before buying

I'll probably need to update this review, but it smells like ear wax atm. I'm surprised immortelle isn't listed because I get a whole whack of that.

I was hesitant to buy it because people don't seem to like it much, and because I seem to have difficulty appreciating fragrances heavy on resins. Well, I bought it, because it appears to de discontinued, so the prices won't get any better. And I grabbed it on ebay for cheap for my Lutens Collection, and I am happy I did. It definitely leans into gourmand territory, but doesn't cross that line fully. I absolutely get "maple syrup" that many people talk about, or maybe it's caramel syrup. Eating pancakes with syrup in the pine/cedar woods with a fire burning is absolutely spot on description. It's unique and mysterious. And it has a gorgeous powdery leather drydown.

Smokey caramel resin... It's very green but smoky caramel and huge doses of resin. Also i can get allot of fruitti notes in here! I'm not really sure, but i can relate this to "Fille en Aiguilles" but with more doses of salt, and smoke. The strength of this blend is just too much. Fair.

This is very nice. It opens with full on caramel spice, then dries down to be basically identical to Fate Man. So for me it's a less bold, less complex Fate Man. It's very similar to the spicy skyscraper Serge Lutens scents such as L'Inommable or Serge Noir. The elephant in the room for me is tobacco. There's loads here to my nose. Lovgevity is mega, more than 16 hours and still noticeable.

I was hoping a lot for burnt sugar, caramel, maple syrup everyone is talking about. I gave it several chances, during the wintertime but all that happens is me smelling like an assistant cook that has spent a day at an Indian restaurant’s kitchen. Curry is all I get!

Okay now this has grown on me. First time I tried it, all I could pick up was maple syrup and celery seed. It’s better now but too many contradictions - syrupy and vegetal, bitter but sweet, fresh but dark. Complex, yes, but I don’t find it very harmonious. I like this on my husband way more than myself. Decidedly masculine. This really really does smell like maple syrup though, incredible.