Discover “Mal-Aimé” or the praise of weeds, the new perfume by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato.

Slopes, mountainsides, crevices and wastelands. You see them everywhere. Don’t smell them anywhere. No perfume honours them. And yet they are fragrant, these weeds that are said to be bad because they are not planted. Because they grow by themselves, spontaneously, carefree, perennial, untamable.
Marc-Antoine Corticchiato has created Mal-Aimé to finally do justice to these wild herbs, which have been banished from the bottles and the beautiful neighbourhoods. Mal-Aimé is an iconoclastic fragrance because it gœs against the grain of a perfumery that only claims to use noble materials. It is inspired by a common plant with a rare essence, as it is totally new to perfumery. The scented inula, bristles everywhere in Corsica with its dishevelled yellow flowers. Its essential oil, distilled from plants gathered in the scrubland, represents a real treasure for the perfumer. As the hours go by, this emerald green essence unfolds its wildly generous facets. Herbal? One would have thought so, given the nature of the thing. But now, inula borrows its fragrance from the rose and its sweetness from honey. It feels as sunny as the colour of its flowers? It is also woody, salty and musky. Around this beautiful and rebellious unknown, Marc-Antoine Corticchiato summons the whole procession of unloved plants, thistles, nettles, brambles and roots, to pay homage once again to his native Corsica. Confusing, avant-garde, never felt… Naturally noble. Inevitably iconoclastic. A perfume like no other.

The perfumer’s word: a perfume dedicated to an accomplice of the maquis and the bush

“Weeds: I think this is an unfair appellation because they are often benevolent and can possess beneficial health virtues, like inula or nettle.”
This Mal-Aimé is a tribute to friendship. The essence used by Marc-Antoine Corticchiato is distilled by Stéphane and Alexandre Acquarone, sons of Lucien Acquarone, “my accomplice in the bush and the scrubland, from Corsica to Vietnam, via Madagascar and Reunion Island”, says the perfumer. An engineer specialising in the manufacture of plant extraction units, “Lucien was a magician who could obtain the best of their perfumes without altering their original scent, always as close to nature as possible.”
This adventurer, “capable of leaving overnight for the other side of the world” shared with Marc-Antoine Corticchiato, a great affection for the inula “this plant with such a particular scent, but rejected by all. For many years we often talked about it, saying to each other that we had to make the scent of this ‘weed’ with its special personality known. But he left too soon. “Mal-Aimé, a perfume full of the essence of inula from the Corsican productions of his sons, is therefore “a nod to Lucien. Lucien, who from up there must be laughing, cup in hand, green and sparkling eye. Green like the essence of inula and sparkling like his favourite champagne.”