This New Film About Dior’s Fragrance Maestro Is a Must-Watch for Scent Lovers
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It’s hard to talk about modern fragrances without mentioning the name Francis Kurkdjian.
The perfumer, who has been Dior’s perfume creation director since October 2021, has had a long and glittering career making scents for several houses, including his eponymously named maison. He’s the nose responsible for everything from Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Le Male, which was released in 1995, to the more recent and widely beloved Baccarat Rouge 540. And when you think about it, it’s hard not to encounter one of his dozens of fragrances when walking through the world’s style capitals.
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It’s fitting, then, that documentarian Matthieu Menu would regard Kurkdjian as a subject worthy of his own film. And earlier this month, a one-hour special entitled Inside the Dream—which tracks the creation of Dior’s newest scent, L’Or de J’adore—premiered on Amazon Prime. It was Kurkdjian’s first project after he started in his new role, so the stakes were particularly high.
“The first big challenge for me is to reinvent J’Adore,” he says in the film. “I tell myself I’m not allowed to fail.”
For Menu, making the one-hour film, which you can watch here, turned out to be a similarly important assignment, as well as a learning opportunity.
“Like most people, I didn’t know how a perfume was made, or what the creative stages—the beginning, the process, and the final result—were,” Menu said in a statement. “In other words, it was a total mystery, waiting to be uncovered, combined with the exciting challenge for a director, of embodying a fragrance, which is by definition invisible, in images.”
The result is a globe-trotting journey that follows Kurkdjian across the globe as the scent comes to life. In it, you’ll see him do everything from meeting with Academy Award winner Charlize Theron—who’s long been the face of the perfume and its various iterations—in Los Angeles to visiting Christian Dior’s home in Grasse and jasmine fields in India to personally smell the raw materials the fragrance required. Along the way, you’ll also hear from other creatives involved in the making of the new scent, including Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s head of couture and ready-to-wear, and Calice Becker, the nose who created the original J’adore fragrance in 1999.
Perhaps the most exciting part about this documentary is that you can experience its results—and some of the excitement that Kurkdjian himself feels during the creation process—in real life. L’Or de J’adore is available now, and in every bottle—which would make a great holiday gift for the woman in your life—is some of the emotion Menu managed to immortalize on film.
“Capturing his pure, sensorial joy in India, when he discovered the fields of jasmine sambac, was a truly precious experience,” Menu says. “It is an incredible moment in the film, when the viewer is with him, feeling his happiness and surprise at smelling the nuances and the facets of a flower.”
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