The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Vertige Troublant translates roughly as "troubling vertigo," which fits the composition's quiet disorientation, a fragrance that seems to drift while actually pulling you somewhere. Launched in 2017 as part of And Other Stories' expanding scent portfolio, it was composed by Jérôme Epinette. The brief here reads minimalist: a single floral opening, a single floral heart, a quiet base. What could have been flat becomes something altogether more unsettling on skin. The tobacco blossom introduces a warm, slightly honeyed quality from the first moments, an almost narcotic sweetness that has no business being as quiet as it is.
What's interesting about this composition is the restraint. The unusual heart note, tobacco blossom, does almost all of the emotional work, with the water lily acting as a cool, almost aquatic foil. The vanilla and musk base doesn't shout. It settles. The result is a scent that reads as one continuous breath rather than a pyramid you can dismantle. On skin, the tobacco blossom takes on a slightly leathery, almost tea-like quality as the hours pass, losing none of its softness but gaining a faintly dry, hay-like edge.
The evolution
The first ten minutes are the coldest part. Water lily opens with a near-aquatic chill, the kind that reads clean and green on skin, almost mineral. It doesn't sparkle the way citrus does; it sits. Then the tobacco blossom arrives, and the temperature shifts. Not smoky, not leathery in the conventional sense, more like the ghost of a dried petal pressed between book pages, with a faint sweetness underneath. By the two-hour mark, the vanilla has taken over completely, warm and slightly powdery, wrapped in white musk that pulls everything close. The lily doesn't disappear, it becomes the freshness that keeps the vanilla from going cloying. On fabric the next morning, what remains is musk and a faint trace of tobacco, like a letter someone left on your pillow.
Cultural impact
Vertige Troublant wears like a private ritual rather than a statement, which makes it a natural fit for the kind of wearer who treats scent as a layer of their own narrative rather than a social broadcast. There's something almost conspiratorial about it, the way it stays close to the skin, revealing itself only in the gestures of a wrist or the warmth of a neck. It doesn't fill a room. It barely fills a hug. And yet something about that restraint makes the people who love it return to it, season after season, wardrobe change after wardrobe change.
