Rarely is a fragrance advertisement as well known as the scent it sells, but it’s impossible to think of Dior’s J’adore without immediately recalling the goddess-like Charlize Theron slinking around in glittering gold dresses on our screens. As the face of the fragrance for almost 20 years, Theron seems as timeless and elegant as what’s inside the bottle, a scent that has stood the test of time since its launch in 1999.
Created by Calice Becker, a master perfumer behind other household name scents such as Tommy Hilfiger's Tommy Girl and Calvin Klein’s Secret Obsession, J’adore was a huge launch for the French fashion house, who first entered the fragrance world in 1947 with Miss Dior, following with other well-known franchises like Eau Fraiche (1955) and the ever best-selling Eau Sauvage (1966). The strong and sweet Poison, launched in 1985, was a radical departure for Dior, being bold, sexy, and entirely modern.
J’adore signalled a return to Dior's more elegant roots. A fresh floral grounded in jasmine, lily of the valley and tuberose, it's twist is a fruit-salad of melon, pear and mandarin orange adding a freshness to some otherwise classic accords. Not too heavy in either the floral or fruity direction, musk also added a smoky edge to this all-rounder – while still unique – fragrance, that was supposedly how Becker imagined gold itself would smell.
The bottle was equally unmatched in its design; an unusual, striking and feminine teardrop shape conceived by jewellery and furniture artist-designer Hervé Van der Staeten. Representing a take on the female silhouette, it also–according to Van der Staeten–was intended to be “a talisman-like object that nestles in the palm of the perfuming hand”. Launching with Estonian model Carmen Kass as the ‘face’, J’adore became an almost instant top seller for the house, second to its enduringly popular Miss Dior, for women, and Eau Savage, for men.
Since the launch of J’adore, and due to it’s huge popularity, iterations of the franchise have been released; special edition bottles with opulent 'necklaces', and fresh versions of the fragrance, such as J'adore Absolu which arrived in 2007, with the jasmine and rose notes supercharged. The most recent takes include J’adore Eau de Parfum Infinissime (2020) and Parfum d'Eau – a lighter, sparkling take on the original (2022).
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The newest incarnation, L’Or J’adore, is perhaps the house's most bold and exciting, not least because of the nose behind it. After joining Dior as perfume creation director in late 2021, the renowned Francis Kurkdjian has been working behind-the-scenes on his big debut with the house, and chose J’adore as the launch project, creating "the gold of Dior" in L’Or.
“I was very close to the original conception in back 1999,” Kurkdjian tells us. “It was created in NYC and I worked with Canlice [Becker] at the time. Its code name was ‘Diana’, as of course Princess Diana was very close to the house.” Though he didn’t actually curate the juice, Kurkdjian was involved in the communications between Becker and Dior, back in Paris, making J’adore was a natural first project for him at the brand.
“The idea came from the story, rather than a concept.” Kurkdjian says, “and this was a story of how gold has to be heated up to get rid of all of its impurities. It gave me the question of what happens if I heat a formula, an eau de parfum? What is the remaining part, the heart of J’adore?” The focus was finding the ‘gold’ of the renowned scent; the pure essence of it.
The original formula, he says, is very complex, “more than 80 ingredients, which is huge”. So finding that heart was a challenge, but “digging into the sweet part of J’adore, and looking at it to enhance the heart of it, like with a magnifying glass,” he found his balance – and L’Or was born.
The notes, he describes, are contemporary, but that doesn’t mean new fangled ingredients. “The notes are the notes, it’s rare there a new ones [when reworking an established fragrance]. It’s more about the final emotion that you want to translate. The main difference for me with this new scent is the way we create the sensuality and sexiness of perfume today compared to 25 years ago. Femininity today is very differently defined than it was then.” Taking the origins of the bouquet from the 1999 fragrance, jasmine and rose stand strong, where orange blossom is added for warmth and luminosity, and ylang-ylang rounds it off. “I wanted to take the old material of J’adore and twist it and reimagine it for today’s woman” he adds, “offering a new sensual and sensorial pleasure”.
The bottle has been modernised too, with a new solid metal cap and the gold ‘necklace’ that adorns it ‘melted’ to become more organic and fluid. “J’adore is iconic in every way, including the bottle. So I didn’t want to change it too much but try to enhance what Dior is about.”
In L'Or Kurkdjian has distilled a classic into a sparkling, opulent, modern new scent. But that's not to take away from the original which is still, very much, one of today's most popular perfumes. Almost 25 years later, the instantly recognisable bottle containing that feminine floral fragrance remains an icon, loved – quite aptly and quite understandably – by women across the world.
