Growing up, visiting my place of heritage, Tamil Nadu in South India, I have clear, fond memories of Pondicherry.

 

 

பாண்டிச்சேரி is a former French enclave on India’s south-east coast, where my family had connections. An eclectic hybrid of France meets India, it was a place of mixed architectural styles, where coq au vin shared table space with Chettinad curries, and bougainvillea climbed colonial balconies under a tropical sun.

 

It was beautiful. It was contradictory. And it was deeply instructive.

 

Here is what the history books tend to gloss over.

 

For all their supposed sophistication with perfume, textiles, and luxury, the French were not discovering turmeric, indigo, vetiver, or sandalwood in India.

 

These ingredients already had thousand-year-old supply chains, dating back to the Roman Empire. They had treatises, pharmacopeias, ritual practices, and entire medical and cultural knowledge systems around their cultivation, preparation, dosing, and use.

 

The French were essentially students, even if they would never have admitted it.

 

And yet, they still called it “the Orient”.

 

 

A single word collapsing half the world’s population into one exotic, digestible, knowable fantasy.

 

India alone has more linguistic diversity than all of Europe.
Twenty-two official languages.
Hundreds of dialects.
Entirely different philosophical, medical, and scientific traditions between regions.

 

And that is just one country in what the West lumped together as “the Orient”.

 

This deliberate reduction allowed Europe to position itself as the rational, scientific, modern counterpoint, and everyone else as mystical, intuitive, and pre-modern.

 

Which brings us neatly to now.

 

Those same “exotic Eastern botanicals” are being sold back to us through luxury skincare and perfumery. Turmeric, gotu kola, liquorice, neem, sandalwood, vetiver, tuberose, jasmine.

 

These were not folk remedies stumbled upon accidentally.

 

They were documented in Ayurvedic texts with specific indications, preparation methods, contraindications, and dosage guidance. Empirical knowledge systems built carefully over millennia.

 

But because this knowledge was not published in a European medical journal, it did not count as “science”.

 

Luxury, meanwhile, has been systematically gatekept from the very cultures it extracts from.

 

The modern beauty industry tends to do one of two things with our botanicals.

 

The first. Turmeric in a cream, labelled “ancient wisdom”, made with the lowest-grade extract, packaged in beige millennial minimalism, and marketed to white wellness consumers playing at spiritual tourism.

 

The second. Dior using sandalwood. Chanel using ginseng. Every luxury house using rice extracts, but always framed through a white gaze, formulated for white skin, staged in white spaces.

 

The ingredients get in.

 

We do not.

 

That is why the name matters.

 

L’ORIENT lets me hold all of this at once. It points directly at the absurdity of the original term. You cannot say LORIENT without thinking about what “the Orient” meant, who named it, and why.

 

But this is not about “Eastern ingredients” as a superficial trope.
It is not fusion as gimmick.
It is not aesthetic borrowing.

 

It is about a genuine third space.

 

It says, these are our ingredients. They always were.

 

So we formulate them the way they deserve to be treated, with high-potency extracts, elegant delivery systems, and advanced cosmeceuticals. Held within vessels that belong unapologetically in luxury spaces.

 

Not as exotic wellness.

 

As luxury.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The name does the work. It is a critique and a claim, simultaneously.

 

It says, yes, I know this word was used to Other us, to flatten thousands of cultures into a single exotic category. And I am taking it anyway.

 

Not to accept the reduction, but to reclaim it on my own terms.

 

There is a quiet poetic justice in that.

 

Because LORIENT is not about the Orient as the West imagined it.
It is about the actual, complex, sophisticated cultures that existed beyond the European gaze, and still exist.

 

It is about saying,

 

We had luxury before you named it.
We had science before you validated it.
We had beauty systems that worked.

 

And now we are building them again, on our terms.

For our skin.

In our image.

With our pleasure at the centre