Tabac Tabou

• Evening
• Night out
• Special occasion
• Romantic

Tabac Tabou centres on a natural tobacco absolute, a complex material from which the nicotine is removed to keep only its richest scent. The idea is to show tobacco at its most noble, far from the image of stale tobacco, by blending it with wild, living nature. The fragrance becomes a raw, animalic and deeply textured composition.

From the opening, you sense a dense, almost leathery tobacco, warm and slightly oily. There is an animalic facet that recalls leather, horse, something alive and instinctive. The whole is powerful, with real depth from the very first seconds.

Then the fragrance moves into a more botanical, wilder world. Notes of plants, hay and narcissus bring a green, almost dry dimension that contrasts with the warmth of the tobacco. Narcissus in particular gives a slightly animalic, textured effect, almost ‘horse’s mane’, which heightens this natural, untamed feel.

Over time, Tabac Tabou becomes rounder and more complex. The tobacco stays present but melts into a richer whole, where leather, plants and animalic facets intertwine. The fragrance keeps a strong signature with plenty of personality, moving between warmth, greenery and animal, while remaining surprisingly balanced and elegant.

Parfum d'Empire is an independent French perfume house founded in 2002 by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, a perfumer and doctor of chemistry. Born in Morocco to Corsican parents, he grew up between his parents’ orange groves in Azemmour and the island’s maquis, in the family home in the village of Cuttoli Corticchiato. A passionate horseman since the age of eight, he did not learn to work with raw materials as a perfumer; rather, as a scientist, he analyzed them for years before bringing them to life. The house’s name refers to the “empire of the senses”, the conviction that perfume appeals not only to the sense of smell, but to all the senses at once. Perfume must be a conquest, romantic, spiritual, or of the self. His vision takes him back to the very origins of perfume: eroticism and the sacred, the two dimensions that all civilizations have recognized in it. His compositions are powerful, crafted without excess, with precision in the service of raw emotion. He draws from a repertoire of rare and complex raw materials, often rarely used elsewhere, chosen for their olfactory authenticity rather than their accessibility. Ambre russe evokes the last tsars. Cuir Ottoman traverses the Orient. Azemour les Orangers brings back to life the Mediterranean of his childhood. Corsica Furiosa and Tabac Tabou earned him two Fifi Awards in 2015 and 2016, the equivalent of the Oscars of the perfume world. A house that is entirely free, entirely unique, entirely itself.