The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Réglisse Noire was the debut fragrance from Jessica Buchanan's house 1000 Flowers, released in 2010. The name translates to "Black Licorice," and that's exactly the territory the perfume stakes out from the first spray. Buchanan composed this as her entry into fine fragrance, a statement of intent rendered as a spice-and-gourmand composition that took a note most formulations relegate to the background and made it structural. English liquorice allsorts were the cultural reference point, the kind of sticky, anise-edged sweets that coat the tongue and stay on the fingers. Buchanan translated that confection into wearable architecture, balancing sweetness against ozone, white pepper, and a base that pulls toward earth rather than sugar.
What makes the composition unusual is the way it builds around a single note most modern perfumers either avoid or reduce to a supporting role. Licorice, in fine fragrance, tends to function as a modifier, a cool sweetness added to anise-forward colognes or tucked into incense compositions. Here it operates as the gravitational center. The mint and ozone at the top provide a cold, almost mentholated counterweight that keeps the licorice from collapsing into pure confection.
The evolution
The first 15 minutes are almost aggressively cold: ozone, mint, and shiso leaf read like stepping outside after a rainstorm. The white pepper sharpens the edges. Then the licorice begins to surface, slow and deliberate, pulling star anise and ginger along with it. By the 30-minute mark the composition has fully reorganized: the cold top notes recede, and the heart takes over with a dense, almost chewy licorice-and-anise accord, cut by cocoa's dry bitterness. This is the phase that defines the fragrance, and it holds for two to three hours with remarkable consistency, the sweetness deepening rather than dissipating as the materials settle into each other. Around the four-hour mark, vanilla begins to soften the licorice, and the patchouli starts to assert itself from beneath, lending a dusky, slightly damp quality to the base.
Cultural impact
Réglisse Noire earned a following as a cult licorice composition, a fragrance that commits fully to an ingredient many wearers either love or avoid. It sits comfortably among anise-and-spice releases that take a single polarizing ingredient and build an entire structure around it, rewarding those who already know they gravitate toward that flavor profile. Wearers tend to be people who already know they like licorice as a flavor and want a fragrance that honors that preference without apology, a scent that smells like the candy they remember from childhood but rendered with the complexity and longevity of a serious composition.
