How Dior Reinvented the J'Adore Fragrance
In the South of France, just west of paradisical billionaire’s playground Antibes, there is a very special farm, situated on a sloping hillside that captures both the unrelenting Mediterranean sun and the gentle breezes that drift northward from the Cote D’Azur. It is called Florapolis, or “city of flowers.” Christelle Archer, the owner of this serene and scenic spot, quit her finance job six years ago to follow her dream of becoming a flower farmer, and is now working to revive production of neroli, derived from the bitter orange tree, which was once the region’s claim to fame. She has a very illustrious partner. “Every drop of the neroli that I produce,” she says, a branch bursting with delicate star-shaped orange blossoms held gently in her hand, “is for Dior perfumes.” And this neroli is making its debut in a Dior fragrance that is nothing short of revelatory.
The new J’Adore Parfum D’Eau is the swansong of recently retired Dior perfumer Francois Demachy (subject of the excellent 2020 documentary, Nose), who longed to create the first highly concentrated, alcohol-free perfume—a composition, as he envisioned it, that would be nothing more than water and flowers, the quintessence of purity and freshness. Alcohol is used in virtually all fine fragrances because without it perfume ingredients are problematic to blend, their scent fades in the blink of an eye, and they tend to lack both stability and complexity. Dior’s innovative water-based formula, which came about thanks to a discovery made by a Japanese skincare lab, involves a high-pressure nano-emulsion technique that results in an elegant, long-lasting mix of essential floral oils and H20 requiring no chemical stabilizers. It is a unique formulation with an unexpected, milky texture that sinks into skin like a hydrating mist.
Without any interference from alcohol, the flowers in J’Adore Parfum D’Eau—magnolia, jasmine, rose, honeysuckle, and the radiant neroli sourced at Florapolis—smell as they do in nature, with an ineffable aura of just-plucked greenness and a sweetness that is true to a blossom at the peak of its bloom. But here’s what makes the scent truly different: unlike traditional fragrances, J’Adore Parfum D’Eau has no base, middle, or top notes. What you get from the first spray is what stays with you until the scent fades—a linear, long-lasting simultaneous bloom of flowers.
Don’t expect J’Adore Parfum D’Eau to smell like J’Adore, Dior’s iconic bestseller. The fragrances share only a lush floral bouquet. Although they are united by common ingredients, Parfum D’Eau is lighter, airier, and, because of the way it mingles with the skin’s pH, somehow more personal. In a way, the transparency of the scent echoes Dior’s efforts to become more transparent with sourcing.
And at its heart this is a sourcing story. In Nose, Demachy expressed a desire to leave as his legacy a truer connection between the house of Dior and farmers who grow the precious raw materials that make Dior perfumes sing. Florapolis is not only a beautiful (and fragrant) location, it’s also the only place in France where finicky bitter orange trees will grow. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area around Vallauris—a nearby village now known for its Picasso museum and collectable pottery—supplied vast amounts of neroli and orange blossom essence for perfumery, but that era ended with a cataclysmic deep freeze in the 1950s. Four hundred of the trees at Florapolis are at least 100 years old, and Archer has both rehabilitated her old grove and planted more saplings, laying the groundwork for the future by revitalizing the past. The same can be said for Demachy, who was inspired by J’Adore—an instant classic when it launched in 1999—to create J’Adore Parfum D’Eau: A refreshingly modern fragrance born from the same roots.
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