I recently spoke with legendary perfumer Calice Becker and learned something surprising about the creation of J’adore, Dior’s world-famous perfume.

The story stuck with me because I saw the parallels with the present moment we are in as a society. It invites us to wonder: what would the scent of a beautiful future smell like?

Let me know what you think.

Onward,
Jasmina
Founder

Transcription for Video:

Okay, does this ad look familiar? It should, because it’s for one of the most famous fragrances of all time, J’Adore by Dior. You’ll recognize Charlize Theron and RiRi in there. But, there’s a story behind this fragrance that very few people know, and I think it’s actually very relevant to something we’re going through as a society today, so I want to share it. 

Welcome to field notes from Future Society, I’m the founder, and what we do here is we visit the past to remind ourselves that the future is still ours to shape. 

And, I know that the future feels really bleak right now, which is actually what makes the story in this video very relevant. Here’s where it starts. 

I had the honor of attending a training session with the perfume behind J’Adore, Calice Becker. She was teaching a class on creativity in perfumery, and it was just a really incredible experience overall. 

While we were in this class, I asked her, what was the actual creative brief behind this fragrance? The reason I was curious about this is because for as, like, culturally impactful as this fragrance was, very little was written about what actually inspired it. 

So her answer surprised me, and I’m pretty sure it surprised everyone who was in the room. There were no visuals, it was really just one line. That line was “create the scent of the new millennium”. 

The timing here is really important. This fragrance launched in 1999, so when she was developing this, it was like peak Y2K. People were fearing technology, they were fearing tech meltdowns, there was just like general anxiety, angst about the new millennium. 

Instead of channeling that anxiety through the fragrance, she actually designed the fragrance to feel positive, bright and golden, which was sort of like daring and risky as a proposition during what was actually a really tense time.

This story struck me, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, because we are, in case you haven’t noticed, living in another time like that right now. But it’s not Y2K. This time it’s AI, climate anxiety, culture and politics that really feel like they are on edge. 

The popularity of J’Adore teaches us, however, that in these moments, whether it’s Y2K or today, that people still seek messages and experiences that transform anxiety into something that gives them a sense of possibility, hope, and self empowerment, rather than just a mirror reflection of the anxiety that exists today. 

And I can totally get this, because as easy as it is to get sucked into the gravitational pull of this attitude of like “well, the future is just going to be apocalyptic, it’s just going to be awful this and awful that.” 

I am kind of sick of that. I am ready for a more positive and optimistic view for the future, not one that ignores or bruises my head in the sand around what’s been going on, but I’m ready to like, reclaim my optimism in some sort of way. And so I think about, is this the creative brief that we all still need today? 

So I ask you, were you to create a fragrance that was the smell of the future, that felt beautiful, what would it smell like?