From left: Terre d’Hermès Eau de Parfum Intense ($160), Burberry Hero Parfum Intense ($192), Kilian Angels’ Share Paradis ($385), Creed Absolu Aventus ($565), Dior Homme Parfum ($160).
Spring is supposed to be a time of renewal, when flowers push up through the frost, green leaves appear on trees, and fragrance connoisseurs switch to new, accordingly light, verdant fragrances.
But sniff the most exciting cologne launches of late and you’ll find notes you’d typically wear when snow’s still in the forecast. What’s more, these woody, spicy compositions aren’t novel ideas, but dialed-up extensions of existing IP. And yet, rarely has a crop of scents felt fresher or more desirable.
Take Angels’ Share Paradis, a sequel to Angels’ Share, from Kilian Hennessy’s eponymous fragrance house. Hennessy, grandson of the liquor magnate, was surrounded by Cognac vessels growing up. In this iteration, he sought to capture the raspberry and rose notes present in some of his ancestor’s expressions—and to enhance the masculine sandalwood, tonka bean, and other rich notes in the scent. “From a technical aspect, we increased the concentration from 20 percent to 25 percent,” Hennessy says of the pure perfume oil in the mix. The result is a complex, powerful aroma you can smell from several feet away.
That quality is increasingly important to cologne enthusiasts, so it follows that perfumers would want to create stronger versions of scents that debuted at lower concentrations. With these “flankers,” “they are creating a modernized scent profile,” says Leila Zagwolsky, cofounder and CEO of the fragrance retailer LuxSB. The enhanced performance translates to “longevity—how long a scent can last on you, but also the scent trail that’s left behind when you walk in the room.”
Burberry’s Hero Parfum Intense is certainly on the right track. It’s the fourth iteration of Hero, which came on the scene as an eau de toilette in 2021. The new version increases the proportion of the line’s central ingredient—a cedar accord sourced from trees in the Atlas Mountains, the Himalayas, and the forests of Virginia—and deploys black pepper and a leathery note, which its perfumer, Aurelien Guichard, says adds a “slightly animalic impression that gives a lot of sensuality to the fragrance.”
Perhaps even sexier is the new Dior Homme Parfum. Because the original Dior Homme from 2005 is heavily reliant on iris, the company’s perfume-creation director, Francis Kurkdjian, scoured the globe for the best available blooms—and “basically, we cleaned up the market,” he says. “It took us two years to create the stock that we needed.” Now, Dior has a dedicated contract with a Tuscan farm to ensure it never runs out of the prized flowers.
Some scents are too intricate to stay on the shelves for long. Creed’s Absolu Aventus, a keyed-up version of its notoriously long-lasting Aventus scent, sold out when it was released as a limited edition in 2023. (At the time, Creed executive Giles Gordon called it a “creative interpretation of an icon—it’s Aventus ‘cut different.’ ”) It was revived late last year to much fanfare, with a slick campaign underscoring how well its citrus notes perform.
But Christine Nagel, in-house perfumer for Hermès, likens the focus on fragrance concentration to too much spice overpowering a dish. Her newest scent, Terre d’Hermès Eau de Parfum Intense, doesn’t have a higher concentration than the versions that came before it, composed by the venerated Jean-Claude Ellena. This edition preserves the flinty, mineral character of the original but replaces its cedar accord with vetiver and adds “an ingredient that had never been used: natural licorice wood,” she explains via translator.
It’s a departure, but not a dramatic leap—which suits Nagel’s way of working. She didn’t “want to make something altogether different. Terre is so splendid that I think you can get it to say new things with a lot of intensity.” Which suggests that in the realm of modern perfumery, the boldest statement you can make is an intelligent remix.
