ORIGINS : POPPY SOMA

Poppy Soma extrait de parfum began with a flower that seemed to portend its own effect: a total lunar eclipse of the heart.

In 2014, as I began developing what would become Les Potions Fatales, I was thinking about flowers not as ornaments, but as thresholds. The idea first sharpened around lily of the valley: a flower celebrated for the innocence of spring and associated with the Virgin Mary, yet also poisonous. That contrast fascinated me, innocence and danger at the same time in the same form, thorns to the rose, beauty carrying consequence. That tension felt powerful enough to extend into a full-on collection.

Poppy Soma extrait de parfum emerged early as one of its central myths.

What fascinated me about the poppy was that it seemed to contain its own prophecy : the milky sap inside the bulb called 'Soma' is processed and consumed as raw opium, a potent psychedelic. The concept extends to the flower itself too, prophetic in its symbolism: a yellow center ringed in white, darkened within and set against red, like a blood moon or total lunar eclipse rendered in petals. It felt like a sign! And what a sign it was!

This burning image of a lunar eclipse gave the fragrance its gravitational center.

With the naming or as we refer to it, the 'spell', I did not want something merely botanical or descriptive e.g. red poppy. What mattered more was the promise hidden inside it: the narcotic milk, substance of dreams, an actual sacred elixir dressed in pleasurable danger.

Poison flowers always belie their intention.

The usa of the word 'Soma' in the naming gounds the perfume in ritual, allowing it to speak of intoxication, altered consciousness, and the deepest kind of seduction.

The Moon Threshold

Poppy Soma extrait de parfum was conceived as a moon-threshold fragrance.

Each perfume in the collection Les Potions Fatales crosses a different gate. Poppy Soma is one that enters the lunar field: a narcotic bloom of reflected light, erotic charge, and the moment fire becomes initiation.

The Lower East Side At Night

When the TV series The Knick premiered later that year in August of 2014, it helped to forge the visual atmosphere of Poppy Soma. Stephen Soderbergh's vision of a turn-of-the-century Lower East Side hospital operating side-by-side with Chinatown opium dens, all set to Cliff Martinez's incongruent electronic score felt both past and future at once. From the vantage point of the QUARTANA studio on the Lower East Side, we watched the neighborhood transformed into 1900's New York, push-carts, hay, and all for filming of the second season of the show.

Seeing that world appear outside our literal front door helped forge the composition into my mind.

Poppy Soma extrait de parfum is an opium dream carried into futurist myth, a safe place against the dark outside where smoke, heat, privacy, and a sense of timelessness pervade.

Though, at its heart, Poppy Soma extrait de parfum is more sacred union than seduction.

What interested me was the idea that desire could become a rite. That intimacy could open a gate. That pleasure could become initiation. The real terrain of the fragrance is not hedonism for hedonism's sake (there's enough of that on planet Earth atm), but transformation through intensity.

In Poppy Soma, the moon is active, fertile, erotic, and hypnotic and activated within, it gives the feeling that something inside has been opened and set aglow.

All of this had to be present in the perfume.

To build it, I worked with Symrise perfumers Emilie Coppermann and David Apel. The concept was vivid from the start: a narcotic, mesmerizing, smoky floral with body heat running through it: something opulent, controlled, and decadent.

There was also a quiet challenge inside it, I wanted to update territory made legendary by fragrances like Opium without at all touching them formulaically — to acknowledge the narcotic-floral archetype while contributing a deeper myth to the canon.

In Poppy Soma extrait de parfum, Jasmine sambac, lush gardenia, and creamy tuberose give the fragrance its narcotic body, the moon at its center. Pyrogenated styrax and frankincense bring smoke, ember, and ritual gravity, while Sichuan pepper adds lift. Red chili is passion, and musk tonquin keeps the whole thing close to skin, where symbol becomes sensation.

Poppy Soma extrait de parfum received the Fragrance Foundation's Perfume Extraordinaire award, blind judged by fellow perfumers — those who understand when a composition has crossed from concept into something beyond.

That is the only standard I cared about.

And why Poppy Soma will always matter, as it's a reminder that intensity has to be earned.

Poppy Soma extrait de parfum was created as a moon-threshold, a narcotic bloom that honors a flower that portends its own hypnotic effect. And when it works, it does more than perfume the body, it changes the temperature of the inner world.

—Joseph Quartana, Creator