Cuir de Nuit
The house’s only extrait, and the only formula that calls for birch tar — the raw material that gives the cuir family its smoked, tannic edge.
- Family
- Cuir
- Concentration
- Extrait de Parfum
- Year
- 1934
- Perfumer
- Élise Verdier
- Batch size
- 18 litres / season
- Top notes
- Saffron, pink pepper
- Heart notes
- Iris, birch-tar leather accord
- Base notes
- Vetiver, styrax
Birch tar is not a comfortable material to work with in the raw — it smells almost entirely of smoke and asphalt in the bottle — and it takes a genuinely disciplined hand to dose it down to something that reads as “leather” rather than “a fire”. Élise Verdier’s 1934 formula uses it at a fraction most contemporary houses would consider too conservative, which is exactly why it has aged as well as it has: the fashion-forward cuir compositions of that decade leaned much harder on birch tar and most read as dated or overpowering today.
We only bottle this one at extrait concentration — at anything lighter, the leather accord separates from the iris rather than sitting underneath it, which was Élise’s whole point in building the formula this way.