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Hemlock began as a film in a green meadow.
A young woman plucks the petals from a small white flower: He loves me. He loves me not. With every petal, a male figure dressed entirely in black PVC moves closer, as though she is calling him into being through a mantra.
He carries a bouquet. He reaches her and presents it. She accepts the flowers—and then, like a mantis, she takes control.
The threatening figure who seemed ready to possess her is placed on a leash. She walks him through the meadow. The hunter becomes the hunted. His menace now belongs to her.
That reversal gave Hemlock its center.
The film begins with attraction to a dangerous influence and culminates in ownership of its force. The woman accepts the desire, faces the shadow, and makes its power answer to her. What approaches as a threat becomes an instrument of agency.
Once the script existed, the perfume seemed to write itself. Perfumer Christelle Laprade became its medium, translating image, psychology, and sound into scent.
The Golden Filter’s Give Me Up, used with the band’s permission, supplied the imagined film’s pulse.
The perfume and film belonged to the same act of transformation from the beginning.
Hemlock flowers grow white and innocent in green, grassy meadows in the South of France.
Their beauty carries an ancient history. Hemlock was also the poison delivered as liquid in a chalice in ancient Greece, with Socrates as its most famous casualty. A delicate white flower growing in a pastoral landscape could contain the force of execution.
That contradiction expressed the deepest logic of Les Potions Fatales.
Poison flowers present purity, innocence, and extraordinary beauty while carrying immense toxicity within them. Their appearance conceals their power. Crossing the threshold reveals what they can do.
In my mind, the poison inside the Greek chalice became a shining black liquid: polished, total, and severe. It carried the intensity of death as a controlled dosage—the possibility of approaching the edge, glimpsing the other side, and returning with full consciousness.
That shining liquid led directly to black PVC.
The poison in the chalice and the regalia of a dominatrix became one material image. A glossy PVC corset, mask, gloves, and boots carried the same qualities as the liquid: control, dosage, discipline, danger, surrender, and immaculate polish.
Hemlock eau de toilette stages an encounter with danger whose deeper purpose is transformation.
Downtown New York was already feeding the image.
Hemlock eau de toilette was conceived in our Lower East Side studio at 56 Rivington Street. Filmmaker and friend Rob Barriales lived across from 56 Ludlow Street, where the seminal band The Velvet Underground formed. That geography carried its own voltage: broken-sounding music, erotic severity, artificial materials, and beauty channeled through darkness.
The black poison in the chalice passed naturally through the world suggested by Venus in Furs—shining boots, control, surrender, and the elegant artificiality of black vinyl.
Around the same period, the black-suited Rubber Man figure from the first season of American Horror Story entered the same internal image archive: a threatening presence sealed inside gleaming synthetic skin.
These references became creation material rather than quotation. They gave Hemlock a visual and psychological atmosphere: downtown, nocturnal, polished, and charged with the consciousness of danger.
Japanese shibari brought another form of tension into the fragrance.
In shibari, the participants actively and consciously enter the field of restraint. Attention sharpens. The shadow becomes present. Control and surrender become deliberate forms of awareness. The ritual brings what is hidden into daylight consciousness, where it can be faced, inhabited, and understood.
That conscious encounter became the reason Hemlock holds itself as one extended session.
Hemlock’s central scent image is that of a black PVC clad dominatrix on a bed of orchids.
White orchids supplied the opposing field: immaculate softness against synthetic darkness, living flesh against polished black material, seeming purity carrying immense force. The white orchid became the bridge between the visual world and the perfume itself, presenting itself through vanilla, white-floral atmosphere, and symbolism. It carries the whiteness of the hemlock flower, the warmth beneath the PVC, and an awakening of divine feminine power. Cinnamon bark supplies the heat of pleasure.
The image is simultaneous and continuous.
Pink pepper flashes against Martinique rum and Calabrian bergamot. Crushed leaves retain the green meadow. Glossy white flowers and sea salt gleam across black vinyl. Styrax, benzoin, vanilla, suede, sandalwood, patchouli, tonka, musk, and amber woods stretch beneath it like a dark, polished bed.
Hemlock has a linear fragrance structure. Danger and comfort, control and surrender, synthetic shine and living warmth remain present together in one field of charged equilibrium. The fragrance holds the session in suspension. The wearer’s relationship to that unbroken field becomes the transformation.
Christelle’s first complete accord arrived in approximately two weeks. It was the first formula among the nine Potions Fatales perfumes to leave me awestruck—to embody the collection brief with such immediacy that the entire world seemed suddenly present.
The next two years were devoted to refinement.
Each of the twenty-one accords were smoothed into one seamless composition. The formula is extremely complex, yet it reads with deceptive simplicity because every material serves the same image. Like the white flower in the meadow, Hemlock gradually reveals the extent of the construction and power concealed inside it.
The film gave fictional form to an authentic inner need.
When I was creating Hemlock, I was dealing with addition issues. My vice was real, and its shadow had gotten the best of me.
Beneath the conscious imagery, the perfume gave expression to a desire for respite, control, and a future in which I held the leash. Hemlock became a personal spell of self-command—a creative calling toward the person I needed to become.
Nine years later, I remain sober.
Hemlock remains an authored record of that inner movement: the shadow acknowledged, desire mastered, and vice converted into evidence of power. It gave symbolic form to a future that I would later inhabit.
Its full meaning reaches through S&M, black vinyl, poisoned beauty, and provocation toward self-command.
On the surface, Les Potions Fatales moves through poison, danger, death, seduction, and vice. Within each fragrance, those forces become instruments of transformation. This is their transmutational power—and your own. Each perfume serves as a bridge to your own hidden power awaiting within.
Hemlock appears as vice.
Its true subject is mastery.
It is the white flower revealed as poison. The poisoned chalice translated into black PVC. The bad influence accepted, leashed, and made to serve a larger becoming. The shadow brought into consciousness with all its danger and vitality intact.
Like every fragrance in Les Potions Fatales, Hemlock carries the wearer toward a power center within themselves that they may not have previously been aware of.
—Joseph Quartana, Creator
