Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing likens the first fragrance he has created to his debut fashion collection for the French house. It changed his life. “It’s my baby,” he told Vogue of Carbone: a heady mix of tobacco, suede, cumin and rose already beloved by Beyoncé, Dove Cameron and Olivier’s mother.

Carbone joins seven other exquisite all-gender scents in the Les Éternels de Balmain perfume collection – the house’s first offering since launching Balmain Beauty in September. Rousteing has wanted to delve into beauty forever, even enrolling in a fragrance school to find “a new way of being a creative director”, and unite the Balmain universe with one harmonious proposition. “Something I hate about fashion is when fashion and beauty are not together. Fashion could not exist without beauty, and beauty could not exist without fashion.”

The new line-up harks back to the past, as Rousteing reimagines signatures, such as the 1979-launched floral Ivoire and 1983’s woody Ébène, but drives it forward with the new formulas leaning into Olivier’s bold, empowering, unapologetic Balmain vision. At the heart of the edit is Carbone, which no doubt you’ll have seen emblazoned across billboards in Dove Cameron’s clutch. Described as being musk-adjacent, Carbone is a sucker-punch of a perfume: smokey, yet sweet, masculine but feminine, dark with lightness hewn in. Translation: everything we want in an all-rounder of a scent that immediately draws the question, “What are you wearing?”