L’Artisan Fleur de Carotte: A Discontinued Green Rarity

At a glance

Fleur de Carotte is a 2000 fragrance by Olivia Giacobetti for L’Artisan Parfumeur: a sheer green composition of carrot, cucumber and tarragon, warmed with apricot and ginger.

It is one of Giacobetti’s vegetable studies, built to smell of a kitchen garden rather than a flower. It was discontinued within a few years and is now a collector’s curiosity.

Creation and context

Fragrantica, Parfumo, Now Smell This and The Non-Blonde all date Fleur de Carotte to 2000, and all credit Olivia Giacobetti. By then she had spent most of a decade building L’Artisan Parfumeur’s catalogue, from Premier Figuier (1994) to Dzing! (1999), and her reputation rested on light, unusual subjects treated with great transparency.

According to The Non-Blonde, it came in a large splash bottle decorated with a paper crown of carrot tendrils, unlike the house’s regular bottles, much as the limited Ananas Fizz came with a pineapple crown. The same review says it was discontinued some time between 2005 and 2006, and Parfumo also lists it as discontinued.

Anyone who likes green, transparent compositions can wear it.

The composition

L’Artisan did not publish a formula. The structure below uses only the materials that Fragrantica and The Non-Blonde both list.

The Non-Blonde adds lettuce to the list and describes the result as “a whiff of cool air through the kitchen garden in summer,” like a weak herbal iced tea with a hint of fruit, ending on a trace of crystallised ginger. She also points out what it is not: iris perfumes often carry a damp, earthy carrot facet, but Fleur de Carotte’s carrot is fresh and abstract, with none of that rootiness. Fragrantica classifies it as aromatic green, Parfumo as green and fresh. (The material usually meant by “carrot” in perfumery is carrot seed oil, which smells quite different.)

Why it matters

Fleur de Carotte is a small but clear example of what made L’Artisan Parfumeur important around 2000. The house let a perfumer take a subject mainstream brands avoided, here the vegetable patch, and treat it with the same care as a floral. That is the approach the History of Perfume traces from Premier Figuier into the niche era.

It also shows Giacobetti returning to an idea. A decade later she composed I Love Les Carottes (2010) for Honoré des Prés, an all-natural line, and CaFleureBon suggests comparing the two to see how her approach changed. Now Smell This lists both in her credits.

Reformulation and editions

No flankers, concentrations or reformulations are documented. Fleur de Carotte appears to have existed in one version, sold for about five or six years in its distinctive splash bottle before it was withdrawn.

L’Artisan Parfumeur has since changed hands. It was sold to Puig in 2015, and several of its older fragrances have been discontinued under the new ownership; see the L’Artisan Parfumeur entry for the house’s history.

Wearing it today

Expect a fleeting, very light fragrance. The Non-Blonde found it gone almost as soon as she had dressed, and Parfumo’s one detailed reviewer also rates its longevity and sillage as low. Apply generously, to clothing as well as skin, and treat it as a cooling splash on a hot day.

Bottles now appear only on the secondary market. Because it is so light, check that any bottle you buy has been stored well, and try a decant first if you can. If you like the quiet, dry register of Giacobetti’s better-known Philosykos for Diptyque (1996), this is the same hand working on a stranger subject.

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