Cio Cio San is the wonderful result of Cécile Zarokian's work and an unusual instruction: to create an imaginary Japan.
Cécile has perfectly created a fragrance that evokes the Far East, Japan to be precise. After Claude Marchal, founder of Parfums MDCI, had spent years collecting old Japanese woodcuts and developing a passion for Japanese art in general, he was fascinated by the challenge of creating a fragrance on this theme.
Cécile's creation perfectly met this requirement, and Claude immediately fell in love with what was to become ‘Cio Cio San’ – his Western vision of an imaginary Japan. Cio Cio San comes from Puccini's opera ‘Madama Butterfly’, in which the heroine Cio Cio San (literally Mrs Butterfly), a charming young Japanese woman, is seduced by the US naval officer Pinkerton and later shamefully abandoned.
However, Claude's ‘Cio Cio San’, however, is a happier story, evoking images of spring in Nara, temples, ornate gardens, precious silks, teahouses and geishas who seem to be from another world... beautiful images (ukiyo-e, ‘pictures of the floating world’, as the famous woodblock prints are called) that allow us to travel and dream.
The bottle
This 75 ml glass bottle by Parfums MDCI is decorated with a red gold ribbon. Its shape is inspired by ancient Doric columns, with a rounded capital and base.
