Ready for a serotonin boost? Hermès’s in-house perfumer, Christine Nagel’s transportive new scent sweeps us away to the untamed beauty of Kythira
On the Greek island of Kythira on the Peloponnese peninsula lies the garden which lends its heart and soul to Hermès‘s newest perfume Un Jardin à Cythère. Kythira is also known as the mythical birthplace of the ancient Greek goddess of love, beauty and fertility Aphrodite. Its magic is captured by in-house perfumer Christine Nagel in this new fragrance, an ode to the wild yet delicate sensuality of Mother Nature on the island.
The ethos behind Hermès’s Parfums-Jardins eau de toilette collection is simple—each scent traces the footsteps of the house’s perfumer in their encounters with the harmonious conversations between nature and culture as they journey through a unique landscapes, often shaped or influenced by water. Conceptualised in 2003, Hermès gives its in-house perfumers carte blanche to dream up scents from wherever their heart (or rather, nose) takes them. The seventh in the collection, Un Jardin à Cythère is inspired by Nagel’s very first visit to Kythira. One spritz of this elemental, gender neutral fragrance—imbued with notes of olive wood, laced with the island’s blonde grasses and topped with notes of fresh pistachio—is set to transport any armchair traveller there.
A spritz of Greek summer
Taking us on a virtual olfactive tour on of the scent, Nagel divulges on her masterful curation of notes: “Olive wood, grass and fresh pistachio and at the same time there’s this citron smell, which is very specific to the wind—the scent brought by the wind, and it’s very present in Greece.”
In a creative plot twist, Nagel’s imagination led her to capture the essence of a garden with no green or flowers in sight. And yet here in Nagel’s world, life is vibrant and eternal. Un Jardin à Cythère offers us a slice of Kythira where the tall grass is unkempt, untamed, and bleached blonde thanks to the yearlong rays of sunshine that help it to shines like gold. Humble, essential fruits of the earth are glorified in this jus where the garden itself is a gentle, free spirit cradled by the blue Mediterranean sea glistening in the background.
“For me, this garden is, for me, a blue, white, and blonde,” explains Nagel. “Blue because it’s the blue of the sea of Greece. It’s absolutely incredible. White because of the beautiful stylistic houses white houses and blonde because of the grasses. And I also like to say that there are three elements in this perfume. First of all, there’s the olive wood, which is the backbone of this perfume. If you compare it to a human being, it would be the backbone. The cereal would be the hair, the blond hair on this perfume and the fresh pistachio would be the flesh.”
This is the scene Nagel set out to capture during the formulation of this perfume.
Un Jardin à Cythère, impressions of Kythira created from Christine Nagel’s memory
Trained as an alchemist, Nagel’s mission was to recreate the sensations triggered the garden’s natural elements, all during the height of pandemic travel restrictions. In creating these elements from memory, and with the help of her little olive wood chalice which she sniffed for inspiration, Un Jardin à Cythère is Nagel’s olfactory reconstruction of the garden—her very own love letter to Kythira.
“For me, it was an emotion that was delicate and regressive at the same time. That comes from the cereal, and the grass brings this toasted cereal smell which is very regressive. And a long time from a long time ago, when I was a child, we had a pram at home and there was a cereal mattress in the pram which was the which is a memory for me. That’s the very, very soft and tender and very pleasant,” she explains with a twinkle in her eye.
“When it comes to the specific story of this perfume, as you know, I’m quite free at Hermès , and the only thing that they tell me is that it’s time to think of a new Jardin. And immediately, I remembered my memories from Kythira and I thought I should do a Jardin from Greece. And as you also know, the perfume, you should go to the place in order to smell the difference then, and just, you know, have a feel of the garden. So I organised a lovely trip to Greece. Unfortunately, with the pandemic, all the trips were cancelled and I didn’t want to give up this idea. So I had another possibility, which was to work from memory.
“I like this idea, because I usually tend to compare things to the work of a painter. When an artist wants to draw a landscape, usually he stands before a landscape and paints that landscape. But he can also look at that landscape and memorise it and painted it from memory.
“Very often, I think there’s a lot of poetry, and there’s more of a soul in this way of doing things. And I thought, okay, “you can’t go there. But you’re very lucky because you can work it from memory and bring that memory back up”.”
To Nagel, the scent represents: “Joy. Astonishment. Of course, sparkle. Because for me, Greece is equal to the sun. It’s very sunny, bright and sparkly,” says Nagel, who attempts to describe the abstract feelings Un Jardin à Cythère give her. “And comfort would be the fourth word, because I think comfort reminds me of cereals as a child, it’s very instinctive. It’s very reassuring and perhaps tenderness as well.”
Nagel’s creative legacy
Un Jardin à Cythère marks Nagel’s second addition to the Parfums-Jardins collection—her first being Un Jardin sur la Lagune, a floral and woody fragrance capturing the romance of a secret garden tucked away in the heart of Venice. Before she took up the role as Hermès’s in-house nose, her predecessor Jean-Claude Ellena created five other fragrances for the collection, starting with Un Jardin en Méditerranée in 2003.
When it comes to perfumery, Nagel is a bona fide master of her craft. Assuming Ellena’s role in 2016 as the sole in-house perfumer at Hermès made Nagel the second woman to ever hold such a role with a major luxury brand (after Mathilde Laurent for Cartier). For Nagel who is a compelling story-teller in her own right, it’s all about the raw materials and ingredients; with over 25 years in the perfume industry and several major top shelf hits under her belt, she’s known to enjoy taking risks and working outside the box, and this new creation certainly delivers on that front.
Artist Elias Kafouros adds the finishing touch
The perfume’s golden liquid that brings to mind the ambrosia fit for Greek gods themselves. Its vessel is Hermès Beauty’s iconic lantern-shaped glass. Greek artist Elias Kafouros’s gorgeous illustrations adorn the box, bringing Nagel’s jardin to life in a paint-and-pen composition bursting with colour—complete with the blonde of the blonde grass, green of the olive trees, pink of pistachios and blue of the sea in the backdrop.
Kafouros is no stranger to Hermès—his fairytale compositions have, in the past, also served as inspiration for several Hermès scarfs, including the Eleftheria, a tribute to the bicentennial of Greek independence created in 2021.
Priced at $228 for a 100ml eau de toilette, Un Jardin à Cythère is also bottled in 30ml and 50ml sizes.
Source : Vogue
