Not exactly a huge departure from the original, but worth the price for sure. Like the mature older brother of Encre Noire that drops him off at the punk rock show and goes to the library at his university to read. Beautiful bottle and scent that punch way above their weight when it comes to the price. Warm, masculine, spicy, and refined. Great for formal occasions. Like an old antiquated church in the middle of the woods full of polished mahogany with a lingering smell of incense. More complex and original than anything you’re likely to find at a department store. Don’t wear this because you want compliments, wear it because it is art. It is a vision of a master perfumer. It is modern history. Overall a more socialized version of the original, but the original still blazed some trails in the community and deserves your respect! 10/10
It indeed opens like an extreme version of the original, but within 10 minutes max it's practically indistinguishable. So it's a good perfume but redundant.
So....I used to be really good at keeping up with new releases and Lalique was a brand I struggled with because they are barely stocked in the UK anymore. Well that's not true EVERY UK based online discounter has them but I'm not blind buying even at a reasonable price. I mean stores that used to carry them, simply don't anymore and that coincided with this release so I never got to sniff the stuff. I love Lalique as a brand too, many of the fragrances are super classy works, even if they are super cheap raw material wise (yes a formula boasting 80% Iso E Super, I'm looking at you!) and Encre Noire is an example of that. To me it smells very faintly of citrus, dry graphite and a smoky dose of Cedar & Vetiveryl acetate...oh and IES. That's it's genius though! Anyway, enough about the original what's this one like? I found it to be an incense type of opening more like a GPH I or a CdG Man, that kind of thing. Peppercorns flung onto some impossibly white hot, cosmic, griddle pan, instantaneously sublimating on impact into a diffuse, peppery, vapour. Then a cypress/cedar, some sandalwood, spicy, softness but more of that raw, gloomy day, Vetiver from the original. I like that Lalique have continued with the dreary and bleak EN aesthetic when they could quite easily just make the crap that other brands churn out, yet they refuse to do so, even the 'sport' flanker in this line had the original at it's core. I think L'Extreme is alright.
![Picture of Helium [2He] fragrance](https://ik.imagekit.io/fragplace/s3/global/7/8/78caa41a-50d3-4b86-b565-9f7fa78236ff_fb96a3be-7392-4022-a315-764dc3b207df.png?tr=w-1920,q-85,f-auto,bg-FFFFFF)
