Photos Courtesy of Company
With Morning Star, the French niche house and perfumer Louise Turner treats light as a process, a scent that starts in shadow and keeps opening.
Dawn is not a switch. It is a slow, cool, slightly metallic hour in which the sky changes before anyone has decided how to feel about it. That hour is the subject of Morning Star, the new chapter from Liquides Imaginaires, and it is a more interesting brief than most of what lands in a fragrance inbox.
The muse is Venus, the brightest point in the sky just before sunrise. Ancient skywatchers saw it at the edges of the day and gave it different names, without realizing it was one continuous body in motion. The house frames this as an ancient duality. Morning Star reads it as a cycle, and the scent follows the same logic.
The house is well suited to the idea. Philippe Di Méo imagined Liquides Imaginaires in 2011 as a French niche project drawing on mythology, legend and nature. He is a designer who has also worked for Baccarat and Jean Paul Gaultier and often begins with writing rather than sketching. The house releases its fragrances as conceptual “trilogies,” each collection telling a story, so “new chapter” is more than PR vocabulary here. Di Méo has also teamed up with ballet dancers and the Paris Opera’s photographer on a short film inspired by Baudelaire’s “Élévation”. This is a perfume house that thinks in poems.
Then there is Louise Turner, whose résumé is like a mood board for the last two decades of fragrance. She began by studying dentistry before a temporary job at Quest, now Givaudan, changed her path, and she has been at Givaudan since 2000. Her work includes Carolina Herrera’s Good Girl and Tom Ford’s Lost Cherry, plus Mugler’s Angel Nova and Margiela Replica’s Lazy Sunday Morning. In February 2025, she was appointed house perfumer at Caron. Her style is often described as joyful and luminous, and she reportedly enjoys more creative freedom with niche brands.
She and Di Méo have worked together before. Blanche Bête, also composed by Turner, was recognized at the 2022 Fragrance Foundation Awards. It also found an audience far from any awards ceremony, circulating on fragrance TikTok under the milky-perfume tag. Morning Star arrives with that audience already waiting.
On paper, the structure moves like a sunrise. It opens bright and subtly metallic, the cool, clear air of that early hour. Fresh jasmine and a milky softness follow, the close-to-skin comfort the milky-perfume crowd already knows. Cedarwood, patchouli, vetiver, and woody musks then settle into a smooth, lasting trail. “Morning Star is calm but radiant,” says Turner. The word to notice is calm. Often the market equates success with projection, so a fragrance that doesn’t shout resonates as an editorial choice.
The release calls the result “unclassifiable,” which in perfume is usually a confession. Here it may be the point. A generation that has stopped treating genre, gender and mood as fixed categories doesn’t need a fragrance to fit a shelf. It needs one that moves the way people do, shifting through hours, moods and versions of themselves without needing to explain each one.
Morning Star doesn’t ask you to be anything in particular. It simply keeps opening, the way the sky does.
