With Éveil du Faune from the Mythology Collection, the Hellenist brand is breaking new ground. Base notes of leather, dark woods and tobacco unfold here to create a powerful and opulent bouquet.
An addictive and unsettling fragrance, suspended between innocence and desire… “éveil du faune” blends the green glow of candied angelica with the animal sensuality of leather and the smoky swirls of tobacco. Poised between softness and instinct, its trail captures that fragile turning point when restraint gives way and desire begins to stir.
The awakening of desire
In the depths of the Foloi Oak Forest, the faun awakens, playful and carefree, nestled in the warmth of a soft nest of damp leaves, beneath the first autumn rays slowly filtering through the foliage.
As a warm breath moves through the forest, a burning sensation suddenly takes hold of his body, unsettling his thoughts and quickening his breath. Innocence begins to waver, slowly yielding to instinct. What is this animal, carnal force awakening beneath the skin?
Captured by French-Greek fashion photographer Nicolas Aristidou, the Éveil du Faune campaign immerses the fragrance in a dense and almost unreal forest; a suspended world between pagan dream and ancient fantasy. Through the presence of dancer Hugo Thabaret, the faun becomes a contemporary figure; neither entirely human nor fully mythological. The body appears as an extension of the landscape itself: damp skin, moss, green shadows and light filtering through the foliage.
“Fauns dwell in woods, mountains and abandoned pastures; they love springs, caves and wild places.” — Ovid, Metamorphoses
“Did I love a dream? My doubt, a heap of ancient night, comes to an end In many a subtle branch.” — Stéphane Mallarmé, The Afternoon of a Faun
The Faun
A free and elusive figure of Antiquity, the faun belongs to the world of forests, springs and hidden clearings. Half man, half animal, he moves through Greco-Roman mythology as an embodiment of life in its most instinctive, joyful and untamed form.
Associated with Pan and the Dionysian processions, the faun dances, plays the flute, sleeps in the damp moss of the undergrowth and celebrates a relationship with the world liberated from human conventions. At once playful, insolent and sensual, he escapes categories altogether; a creature of desire as much as innocence, of mystery as much as light.
With Éveil du Faune (Faun's Awakening), Hellenist Parfums imagines the scent of this sylvan presence; a unisex fragrance infused with the vegetal freshness of a forest after rain, the warmth of bare skin and the gentle animality of a being still close to nature.
The perfumer Alienor Massenet
An intuitive and deeply sensitive perfumer, Alienor Massenet has been developing a free, emotional and spiritual olfactive signature for more than thirty years. Fascinated by the invisible correspondences between matter, emotion and energy, she approaches fragrance creation as a form of contemporary alchemy.
Known for her vibrant and textured compositions, she enjoys working with contrasts; light and shadow, softness and animality, innocence and sensuality. Passionate about stones, art and the symbolic dimensions of raw materials, she considers perfume to be an emotional language as much as a technical construction.
With Éveil du Faune, she creates for Hellenist a captivating and addictive fragrance; a composition in which the materials seem to breathe in rhythm with the skin.
