There are some places so beautiful they almost feel made up. Polynesia, at least as I imagine it, is one of them: impossibly blue water and cinematic sunsets. Christine Nagel has lived that fantasy. When the Hermès perfumer finally travelled there, it was with equal parts excitement and apprehension. A place with a reputation like that has a lot to live up to.
What she found instead was something stranger and more transporting than fantasy. “As soon as I set foot on the very first boat that took me to the island, the magic really began,” she tells me. There were tiare flowers everywhere, tamanu trees dropping tiny nuts with an unexpectedly nutty scent, Tahitian vanilla that felt “more fleshy, perhaps more sensual” than the kind she knew from perfumery and fresh coconut that smelled vibrant and milky rather than sugary.
And then, as all good trips do, it found an unexpected way to surprise her. Nagel had wanted to scuba dive, but was told to do something simpler: skip the oxygen tank, put on a mask and snorkel, enter the lagoon and let the current do the work. “When you get underwater, you can no longer hear anything. All you can hear is the sound of your own breathing,” she says. Just beneath her, a coral garden opened up in full colour. She drifted over it again and again, carried like a child on a roundabout. “I asked myself, what would it smell like if it had a scent?” That question became Un Jardin sous la Mer, Hermès’s new fragrance.
Back in Paris, when this reverie had to become construction, Nagel began assembling it note by note, seeking out Tahitian vanilla, a precise coconut extraction and tiare notes, while refusing to let the fragrance slip into the usual beachy clichés. In her hands, Polynesia turned into bergamot that moves through the composition, breezy like the wind, fresh coconut rendered with a milky clarity and most intriguingly, a mineral-salty accord that is meant to evoke underwater coral.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
