A Shift of Harmony
L’Hantise is my first and most personal fragrance, tracing my unexpected path from music to perfumery. The music of my childhood—Chopin’s études and waltzes—encapsulates the deep rhythm that shaped my upbringing. My five-year-old self was obsessed. Like a time-lapsed memory scored in waltz time, that early devotion to music became the emotional architecture of L’Hantise—a fragrance shaped by discipline and the echoes of longing.
As an adult, I wasn’t sure if an artistic career could support me. After years of study, the insecurity of a music career was mounting, further clouded by performance anxiety and the desire to create rather than interpret. As my interests diverted from music performance, Covid forced a natural crossroads. I turned to a more sensible plan, believing engineering would stabilize artistic uncertainty.
Instead of pausing music gently, I wrestled with the deliberate fracture of leaving a career for which I deeply longed and a passion I could never truly escape. Unable to reconcile my choice with the voice I had silenced, it would be over three years before I picked up my viola again.
Perfume as Counterpoint
In engineering, I found structure, precision, and the logical edges of routine. Although it offered a new form of creative problem-solving, my work felt clinical and isolated, a world of linear parts rather than an evolving, expressive whole. I deeply missed the creative conversation of counterpoint and melody—but I still wasn’t ready to pick up an instrument.
Sensing this restlessness, my partner cleared a space on the kitchen counter. There, the experiment of perfumery blossomed. Quickly becoming a new refuge, fragrance offered harmony, structure, and the improvisational focus akin to music. Here, L’Hantise began to take shape—an apparition that hovered for nearly a year before revealing its true form.
Reimagining the Past
I dove into fragrance with the same fervor that fueled my childhood obsession with Chopin. What I didn’t realize was that creating L’Hantise would mirror my own musical unraveling, which had now officially become an unresolved and out of reach ghost. Old doubts began to whisper familiar fears; as it turned out, L’Hantise would be just as elusive as my music career. Meanwhile, my partner gently insisted, “Just play...”
I slowly returned to Chopin, Fauré, and Schubert, eventually embracing the worn varnish of my viola and the creaky pedal of our antique piano. These months were imbued with intermittent frames of static memories—the scent of warm stage lights, burning dust, the faint tapping of a conductor’s baton on metal. I recalled a dream I once had of a small white room from my college years filled with echoes of laughter, fatigue, and childhood études. The sounds and the dream faded as I reached for the cool glass doorknob… upon waking, I knew a chapter had closed forever.
That dream became the inspiration for L’Hantise—a flickering passion I once tried to leave behind. All the while, this neglected spirit waited patiently, making space for something luminous to emerge—not just in the act of letting go, but in the hesitant breath of promise that followed.
Capturing Time in a Bottle
At first, I composed L’Hantise the way I approached music—through structure, balance, and emotion. But this fragrance defied completion. Each time I refined it, the melody slipped just out of reach.
My partner encouraged me to stop searching and simply listen. In that shadowed space I began noticing the familiar rests between notes—but I also heard phantoms beneath the melody. Slowly, a new voice began to emerge, and I reluctantly allowed L’Hantise to remain an apparition moving deeper into its own mystery.
I stripped everything back. Haitian vetiver and patchouli from Grasse grounded the formula in something earthy and forgotten, like a buried chord. The amber, once a faint hum, thickened into something resinous and alive. I tuned the herbal heart—sage, cyclamen, lily of the valley—into a cloud just beginning to form.
Then one evening as I drove through the lavender dusk of the Arizona desert, I realized that L’Hantise was never meant to be fully understood. It was telling me it needed to float and drift. So I let rosewood, red currant, and bergamot melt into hints of raspberry, pineapple, and soft florals—notes that barely shimmered before disappearing. Meanwhile, my own spirit was reemerging.
The Alchemy of L’Hantise
L’Hantise became my reckoning, my reconciliation. Like music, I almost walked away. But each time I slowed and listened, it returned—shifting, surprising, and growing more ethereal. Buchart Colbert’s passion for layering also began here; the pursuit of something evanescent, multi-dimensional, and deeply personal.
When we founded the brand, I had only just closed the door in that dream of the white room. Since then, we’ve crossed many thresholds—each forging something bolder and more intentional. L’Hantise, still my partner’s favorite, remains a living thread in our story—a layered tale of transformation and alchemy.
This is the heart of Buchart Colbert: where past and present, structure and intuition, light and shadow converge. Here, paradox becomes power.
A Fragrance Between Worlds
More than a perfume, L’Hantise drifts between presence and absence—fragmented, elusive, untethered. A poetic distortion of its namesake La Hantise, it carries the weight of longing and the lightness of letting go. Because passion is never linear. Like water or air, it evolves, disappears, and finds its own way.
Whatever moves you—let it breathe. Let it change. Even in its most elusive form, the spark will always return.
—Sean Colbert
