One of Yves Saint Laurent’s favourite hues was that of the midnight sky.
“Black is my refuge,” he is reported to have said. ” A stroke on the white page,” he added, before translating it into his iconic Le Smoking suit.
And, the house has been linked to all things ebony ever since.
Pink, however, was allegedly his other preference. Although YSL never played it alone.
Instead, it always came in tension – with the use of fuchsia in the Black Opium world, delivering a fragranced interruption designed to cut through the dark.
That contrast has been central to the scent since 2014. Black Opium was a younger take on Opium, which launched in 1977. And the first feminine fragrance built on a black coffee accord, softened with white flowers and vanilla. It has been reworked several times since, as Over Red, with red cherry, and as Le Parfum, with four vanillas. The house did something similar with Libre last year, adding a fruity Berry Crush edition.
The newest addition is YSL Black Opium Pink Glaze. A scent that suggests that pink might be the new black.
It was made by the same four perfumers behind the 2014 original (Nathalie Lorson, Marie Salamagne, Honorine Blanc and Olivier Cresp), and the coffee floral is still at the centre. A natural strawberry extract runs from the top of the scent to the base, so think of a strawberry-glazed espresso. The perfumers describe it as a gourmand strawberry over a coffee floral, built around two jasmines and vanilla and finished with amber woods. The jasmine is captured at YSL Beauty’s Ourika Community Gardens in Morocco, where the living flower’s scent is recorded rather than the petals harvested, and it’s enriched with a jasmine sambac absolute from India. The Bourbon vanilla from Madagascar adds a warmer, slightly balsamic note. The gardens are run in partnership with the NGO Agrisud, supporting a cooperative of women.
The bottle carries the pairing too. It has been redesigned with sleeker lines, and the glass is translucent, so the pink liquid shows through. The round metallic Cassandre window turns black to match the cap.
Alisha Boe fronts the launch as Black Opium’s new global ambassador. The 29-year-old actor was 19 when 13 Reasons Why made her name, and she now plays Lady Conchita Closson in The Buccaneers on Apple TV+. The campaign was directed by C Prinz, who was movement director on Charli XCX’s Brat tour. It follows Boe and her friends through a vintage-style diner, with a Gen Z night out set against mid-century style and an 00s anthem on the soundtrack. Nobody leads, and the focus is on the group. Prinz sums up the scent in one line: “That first spray hits like the first sip of espresso.”
It’s the same coffee-floral base as 2014, with a strawberry glaze on top, and for a house so closely tied to black, a splash of pink.
