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Before Bleeding Heart was a perfume, it was a sacred space that looked good enough to eat.
Chiesa del Gesù di Casa Professa in Palermo, Sicily.
In 2023 while researching majestic cathedrals, Joseph Quartana encountered the Chiesa del Gesù di Casa Professa in Palermo. Its Sicilian Baroque interior appeared almost edible: cream, blush, rose, gold, and floral abundance layered like an enormous, impossible wedding cake.
He imagined cutting a slice from the church and asked what that architecture would taste like on the tongue or smell like on skin. The image supplied the perfume’s first world: sacred marble transformed into cream, flower, warmth, and charged sweetness.
The Bleeding Heart, Lamprocapnos spectabilis, bears pendant blooms shaped like pierced hearts, each one releasing nectar from below.
Beautiful and poisonous if ingested, the flower makes heartbreak physical. In its tragic story, a prince offers a princess flowers, fruit, sweets, and unwavering devotion. When his love goes unanswered, he drives a dagger into his chest, leaving the bloom to hold the drama forever.
PARFUMS QUARTANA changes the ending. The prince survives. The flower keeps its poison, but the dagger wound loses its power as unrequited love is redirected toward the self.
Rose, peony, strawberry, and chocolate become gifts returned to their source. The wearer becomes both the Bleeding Heart and the recipient of everything it releases.
Perfumer Laure Breysse translates each movement of the story into scent. Rose Oxide, cooling Cardamom Oil, and a flash of Grapefruit give the Dagger Accord its cold, metallic clarity. Madagascar Cocoa Extract rises beside it like the first dark mist of the incision.
Bulgarian Rose, Strawberry, and Peony form the offered heart: petals, ripe fruit, tenderness, and sweetness gathered in one living form.
The drydown arrives as release. White Chocolate turns molten against Blonde Caramel. Madagascar Vanilla Bourbon Absolute, Amber Woods, and White Musk surround the skin until the earlier sharpness is submerged in creamy light. Plush, luminous, and enveloping, the final impression is less dessert than sanctuary.
Dagger Accord (Rose Oxyde, Grapefruit, and Cardamom Oil)
Madagascar Cocoa Extract
Bulgarian Rose
Strawberry
Peony Accord
White Chocolate
Blonde Caramel
Madagascar Vanilla Bourbon Absolute
Amber Woods
White Musk
The creative challenge was to elevate familiar Valentine’s gifts into haute perfumery without losing their emotional immediacy, and without veering into cloyish, teeny-bopper territory. White Chocolate became the technical and narrative center. It had to feel ultra-realistic, creamy, and radiant without becoming waxy, sugary, or candied. Blonde Caramel held it in a permanent golden register.
Art director Sophie Na wore a key mod throughout a summer journey across Sicily, allowing the creators to experience it day after day and gauge strangers’ reactions. The formula held its magic. The remaining work became refinement rather than reinvention.
“When the materials stop reading as a list and begin to sing a symphony, I call that wow factor.”
— Joseph Quartana, Creative Director
Director Joseph Quartana visits Casa Professa with Bleeding Heart
In the summer of 2026, Quartana returned to Palermo with the finished perfume and carried it inside Casa Professa as an offering. Holding the bottle inside the church, he felt the idea complete its circle, closing a circuit between vision and place.
Bleeding Heart is the official tenth-anniversary release of Les Potions Fatales and the collection’s tenth Potion Fatale. The first nine fragrances approached poisonous flowers as thresholds to transformation. Bleeding Heart puts that discovery into action as talisman: the darkness supplies the material, but the perfume is the transformation.
Bleeding Heart is an homage and remedy for anyone heartbroken: drowning in one's own gushing vital essence bouys one up and out of the chronic pain associated with a stabbing of the heart through the mechanism of self-love, and into a place of resplendent sanctuary.
