Jean Paul Gaultier Le Beau Paradise Garden: fragrance review

 Le Beau Paradise Garden by Jean Paul Gaultier is "a tribute to the Garden of Gaultier, filled with vibrant flowers and enticing scents. It masterfully blends the salty coconut's freshness with the green fig's lushness and sandalwood's soothing warmth. Hints of zesty ginger, cool mint, and sun-drenched tonka bean enhance the fragrance's green aquatic and woody character, making it an ideal embodiment for energetic and passionate men." 

pic borrowed via pinterest

Does it deliver? Yes, it surprisingly does. Perfumer du jour Quentin Bisch masterfully composed this fragrance as a woody, green, aquatic melody, capturing the divine atmosphere of a tropical haven in an Eau de Parfum for men concentration. 

Drawing inspiration from the Jean Paul Gaultier Autumn/Winter fashion collection of 2010-2011, imagine a lush, enchanting garden named "Le Beau Paradise Garden" and "La Belle Paradise Garden," a haven of intense delights and fervent desires. The box with its paradisaical pro-lapsarian motifs and the bottle with the green hue and the delicately woven codpiece attached are very pleasing to the eye. Picture a bottle of striking beauty: an emerald-green glass ornately embroidered with a vibrant vine leaf, boasting exquisite, high-fashion details. 

Le Beau Paradise Garden by Gaultier now encompasses the saltiness of Mugler's Womanity (a stand in for the genitals hidden by a fig leaf?) with its fig overtones for the main chord and buttresses them up in delicious coumarin-rich tonka bean. This gives a tasty dessert quality to the mix, creating a good tension between the salty and the sweet without succumbing to either. Although we can't expect something too innovative, since the main chords have been done before and tonka beans are everywhere apparently in later years, I find it a balanced composition. Coconut is more reminiscent of coconut water than shredded coconut sweets, which can become too sweet. In the original Le Beau I found the coconut rather too much, as I'm sensitive, but here it's just right. It's more aqueous overall, with hints of the pre-lapsarian Garden of Eden — green, damp, wet, and creamy. Tonka, after all, is in the same compound class as lactones, and it makes sense to pair them. 

It does come across a bit synthetic, because —hey! — it is synthetic, but the entire market is synthetic anyway. Yet it's mild, quite fresh, mouth watering, not really botanical (which is usually associated with men's fragrances), and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't insult anyone. 

Official fragrance notes for JP Gaultier Le Beau Paradise Garden: 

TOP NOTES Aquatic Notes, Mint, Ginger, Fresh Greenery
MIDDLE NOTES: Salty Coconut, Green Fig
BASE NOTES: Sandalwood, Tonka Beans

Hermes Un Jardin sur la Lagune: fragrance review

In old novels, in the time of Balzac and thereabouts (as I have written in detail before), or even prior to that time, there is the well-known trope of the poor relative, usually female, who receives the second hand clothes of their elders and betters in social status, with the acceptance of keen appreciation of their circumstances. Governesses, school mistresses, nurses, or beneficiaries of a small income of a few pounds or francs a year, thanks to the generosity and sense of due of an almost unknown yet benevolent antecedent. In the world of perfumes, this situation is usual and usually ignites the same condescending acceptance: "close, but no cigar; divested of the elements which make the original truly flamboyant or plush, bon pour l'Orient."

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It's with great pleasure that I found out that Un Jardin sur la Lagune by Hermes (a spring 2019 launch) is an exception to that scenario. One of my favourite and closest to heart fragrances, Lys Méditerranée by perfumer Edouard Fléchier for the niche brand of Frédéric Malle, has a little cousin; one who does not ape the greater one, nor does it deign to wear the elder's hand-me-downs, Un Jardin sur la Lagune by Hermes.

An abstract feeling of petals from flowers of another dimension, of champaca and bliss, unfolds into space like cones which embraces with arms opens wide, with the piquant joy of citrusy touches and the blissful cocoon of white musk.

In Un Jardin sur la Lagune, inspired by a secret Venetian garden which Christine Nagel, in-house perfumer for Hermes, discovered thanks to the writings of a blogger, the feeling of solace and silent contentment is palpable.

The scent of far away algae is delicate in Un Jardin sur la Lagune yet there, the salty water which hits the lonely craggy shore or the foundations of an old building immersed into the water, possesses that sort of introspection, a very humane sense of disorganisation and an ironic look on the state of the Human Condition that even Balzac would be jealous of.

Les Jardins series in the Hermes portfolio is a line of easy and lightweight fragrances which began its course in 2003 with Un Jardin sur la Méditerranée, the impression of a mediterranean garden where people nibble on freshly cut figs. Next came Un Jardin sur le Nil (2005), inspired by a trip to Assouan, in Egypt; then Un Jardin apres la Mousson (2008), evoking the watery landscape of Kerala, India, after the passing of the monsoon; Un Jardin sur le Toit (2011), inspired by the war-time garden on the terrace of the flagship Hermes boutique in Paris, and Le Jardin de Monsieur Li (2015), a minty citrus evoking a special eastern garden. 
All prior Jardin fragrances have been composed by legendary perfumer Jean Claude Ellena (an interview of whom I had the honour of taking HERE), and therefore Un Jardin sur la Lagune is Christine Nagel's first entry in the series.