Mal-Aimé

Embankments, mountain slopes, crevices, and wastelands. You see them everywhere. You smell them nowhere. No fragrance graces them. Yet, they exude a sweet scent, these herbs deemed weeds because they aren't cultivated. Because they grow wild, spontaneous, carefree, perennial, untamed. Disdained by humankind, like those marginalized, outcast beings who fiercely conceal their nobility out of modesty, or because they ask nothing of anyone...

It is to finally do justice to these wild herbs, banished from bottles and upscale neighborhoods, that Marc-Antoine Corticchiato offers them Mal-Aimé. An iconoclastic fragrance because it goes against the grain of a perfumery that only claims to use noble materials, Mal-Aimé is inspired by a common plant with a rare essence, one that is completely new to perfumery.
The fragrant elecampane – Inula graveolens for botanists – bristles its tufts of shaggy yellow flowers throughout Corsica. Its essential oil, distilled from plants gathered in the maquis – and certified organic – represents a true treasure for the perfumer. As the hours pass, this emerald-green essence unfolds facets of boundless generosity.

Herbaceous? We might have suspected as much, given its nature. But here, the inula borrows its fragrance from the rose and its sweetness from honey. It smells as sunny as the color of its flowers? It also reveals itself to be woody, salty, and musky. Around this beautiful and rebellious unknown, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato summons the whole procession of the unloved—thistles, nettles, brambles, and roots—to pay homage once again to his native Corsica. Disconcerting, avant-garde, unlike anything ever smelled before… Naturally noble. Inevitably iconoclastic. A fragrance like no other.

A word from the perfumer: a fragrance dedicated to an accomplice of the maquis and the bush. “Weeds: I think that’s an unfair term because they are often benevolent and can possess beneficial properties for health, like elecampane or nettle. Besides, I’ve never had the heart to eliminate the wild elecampane plants that grow in my garden in the middle of the maquis.”

This "Unloved" fragrance is a tribute to friendship. The essence used by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato is distilled by Stéphane and Alexandre Acquarone, sons of Lucien Acquarone, "my partner in the maquis and the bush, from Corsica to Vietnam, by way of Madagascar and Réunion," recounts the perfumer. An engineer specializing in the manufacture of plant extraction units, "Lucien was a magician who could get the best out of their perfumes without altering their original scent, always staying as close to nature as possible."

This adventurer, "capable of leaving overnight for the other side of the world for a crazy project"
In addition to a love of gastronomy, wines, and aromatic plants, he shared with Marc-Antoine Corticchiato a great affection for elecampane, "this plant with its unique scent, yet rejected by everyone. For many years we often talked about it, saying that we had to make the fragrance of this 'weed' with its distinctive character known. But he left us too soon." Mal-Aimé, a perfume brimming with elecampane essence sourced from his sons' Corsican production, is therefore "a nod to Lucien. Lucien, who must be laughing up there, glass in hand, his eyes sparkling green. Green like elecampane essence and sparkling like his favorite champagne."