The New Hermès Fragrance Will Transport You to Greece

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In many ways, Hermes’s new fragrance Jardin à Cythère is a scent of the imagination. It was inspired by a Grecian garden that Hermes perfumer Christine Nagel visited many years ago, but she created it in a Paris lab during lockdown, working from memory like a painter in a blank studio trying to recapture the nuances of a landscape once seen and loved. It is also a fragrance that posits an imaginative question: What is the scent of a garden without flowers? Or, indeed, of a garden without greenery? The answer may surprise (and will certainly delight) you.

Nagel began with a memory from the island of Kythira: walking in the sun; leaning in to smell “the elegant and delicious scent” of an olive tree; realizing that a delicate scent she detected on the wind came from the golden grass under her feet. “For me, Greece is blue, white, and blond,” she says. “The blue of the sea, the white houses, and the golden blond tall dry grasses. And when I thought about being there, I also thought about how it felt to touch the trunks of the olive trees. It is a very powerful thing. These trees are very ancient, and when you caress them, you can feel their age. I decided that I wanted olive wood to form the backbone of the fragrance, but I also wanted to convey the warmth of these tall golden grasses, that smell something like toasted cereal or grain.”

The fragrance’s hat-trick, though, is the surprising introduction of pistachio. Not the sweet pistachio of a dessert, nor the nutty, powdery smell of a pistachio shell, but the scent of a fresh-from-the-tree pistachio, newborn and tender. “When you think about pistachio usually you think about ice cream. You think about that almond scent,” Nagel says. “But in Greece, you see fresh pistachio, and it’s pink. It’s very sensual. It’s not so much about smell as it is about texture. It’s very soft, almost like flesh.”

As a final touch, Nagel added a fresh note to represent the wind and the feeling of being outdoors. Working in a locked down city, in a closed-up space, she dreamt of sun and wide-open vistas; Jardin á Cythere was like opening a window and traveling—at least in her mind—to a place free from confinement. When you smell it, all of these elements come through and you feel that way too. The scent is both grounding and aethereal; familiar and completely new. For those averse to florals but who crave freshness, it will be a revelation; for those who want to wear something transporting and unobvious, it will become an addiction.

For Nagel, it is in many ways a scent of rebirth, reconnection, and return. As she was working on it, she began to realize how meaningful, and even symbolic, its ingredients had become to her. “It is important to remember that the grasses are dry, but you only need a little rain to see the roots go green again. They are not dead, only sleeping.” When the fragrance was complete, and lockdown over, she traveled to Kythira again to experience what she had spent so much time imagining in Paris. “I was delighted to see that my memories were right,” she says. “That garden was alive—not just on the island, but as an idea and feeling I had throughout the Peloponnese. The emotions it evoked in me were the same. And when I revealed the scent to my Greek colleagues, they said, ‘Ah, this smells like home.’ That, to me, was sheer happiness.”

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