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We were just a couple of guys camped out in the Utah desert, talking about flowers. Sure, Camp Sarika is technically part of the twenty-first century Winter Palace known as Amangiri, a resort where rooms run in the mid-four-figures per night. And one of those guys was Francis Kurkdijan, who since 2021 has been the creative lead for fragrance at Dior, a sparkling diamond in the collection of the luxury conglomerate LVMH, the largest company in Europe. But that doesn’t change the fact that lavender is the only traditionally masculine flower. And, as Kurkdijian explained, Sauvage, Dior’s planet-devouring fragrance, is fundamentally a story about lavender and men.

We were there to talk about Sauvage Eau Forte, the latest iteration of the scent. The original Sauvage was launched in 2015 (and is essentially unrelated to 1966’s Eau Sauvage, Dior’s very first masculine). Since then, it has become that rare post-internet mass-cultural tentpole—besides Marvel movies—to achieve total domination. Worldwide, it is the best-selling perfume of any kind, for any gender. While I could tell you it smells like fresh robot laundry or an android James Bond, in another way I probably don’t need to, because if you have read a paper copy of GQ in the last decade, there’s a distinct chance you have experienced it as an advertisement with a scent strip. In 2021, Business of Fashion reported an estimate that a bottle was sold once every three seconds.

While many fragrance aficionados find the smooth surface of Sauvage itself sufficiently disruptive and surprising, others miss the outsider ethos behind legendary Dior fragrances like Jules (which “feels like when you know your lover well enough to no longer bother closing the bathroom door,” in the indelible phrasing of legendary perfume critic Luca Turin) or Fahrenheit (violets and gasoline, together in leather pants). In any case, this latter crowd is not the target audience for Sauvage.

It is pointed instead directly at the average cologne buyer. Industry pros and hardcore fragrance fans know that “cologne” is either a genderless genre, an eau de cologne, or a lighter, often citrus-infused take of a flagship. But that’s how most American men refer to their fragrance, and in that sense of the word, Sauvage is the canonical contemporary embodiment of a masculine “cologne.”

That status comes with some baggage. The almost-decade since the launch of Sauvage has not been a banner period for American masculinity. And during that period, the face of the fragrance has been Johnny Depp. In 2022, the actor was involved in a trial against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, involving claims and counterclaims of defamation related to accusations of domestic violence. Despite a resolution generally favorable to Depp, headlines about that relationship seem to have made him less in-demand as a Hollywood leading man. But if you wanted to argue that the louche masculinity Depp embodies in advertisements for Sauvage was, if anything, strengthened by his courtroom drama, here’s one piece of evidence: In the wake of the trial, Dior re-upped his contract, reportedly for three years and $20 million, making him the best-paid male fragrance endorser working.

Though Depp remains the face of Sauvage, Dior would be foolish to expect its big winner to stay on top by inertia. The strongest challenge comes from the 2010 release Bleu de Chanel, which is now fronted by Timothée Chalamet. “You have to understand,” the perfume historian Varanis Ridari told me, “Dior and Chanel have long been doing a kind of Spy vs. Spy routine. They’re chasing each other constantly.” In fact, Francois Demachy, the creator of the original Sauvage and Kurkdijan’s predecessor at Dior, defected from Chanel.

A tried-and-true method to keep an aging scent relevant in the marketplace is to release a remix, called a flanker. (The most famous and successful flanker in fragrance history is Drakkar Noir, which is an iteration of the now-extinct plain vanilla Drakkar.) And when Kurkdjian joined the house as perfume creation director at Parfums Christian Dior, creating a fifth Sauvage flanker was his first men’s project. The result is Eau Forte.

It’s priced at $160 for a relatively small two-ounce bottle, 60% more than the standard Sauvage and closer to the prices for Kurkdjian’s private label than other omnipresent department store offerings. It is a wager that the cologne-buying public will pay niche, rather than department-store money for their next fragrance. When the New York Times is publishing stories headlined “When Did Teen Boys Get a Nose for $300 Cologne?”, it seems like a good bet.

On the other hand—was refining someone else’s creation too small a job for Kurkdjian? He had his first industry-defining hit with Jean Paul Gaultier’s Le Male when he was 25. Rather than sign on with one of the big houses, he worked as a free agent before launching his own brand, Maison Francis Kurkdjian, which was acquired by LVMH for an undisclosed but presumably princely sum in 2017. When the conceptual artist Sophie Calle needed a sprayable scent of well-circulated money, she called Kurkdjian. He is a Chevalier of the Order Des Arts et Lettres, one the French government’s highest honors. He won the Prix Francois Coty, perhaps the industry’s greatest award for lifetime achievement—23 years ago. He himself once said being an in-house perfumer would be like being retired. You would be excused to wonder: What was he doing tweaking the latest edition of the last mass market colossus?

Kurkdijan might have been a ballet dancer. But Vaganova, the Russian style, with its bombastic leaps punctuated by an absence of discipline, couldn’t be farther from his own, and it dominated all the New York schools. Instead he found his way to the Institut Supérieur International du Parfum, de la Cosmétique et de l'Aromatique Alimentaire. More often known as ISIPCA, it’s basically West Point for French perfumers. Just a few years later he created Le Male—a masculine so overwhelmingly influential he now flatly refuses to acknowledge its influence. (“Too pretentious,” he told me.)

He has had other successes, but none loom as large as Baccarat Rouge 540, which he released with his own label, in collaboration with the eponymous crystal manufacturer, in 2015. It’s sweet, which makes it indicative of his strengths as a perfumer: In the history of fine fragrance since Ronald Reagan, all the great villains are sweeties. First there was Poison, Dior’s own 1985 apocalyptic tuberose—think molten blow pops—which, according to legend, was banned in more than one fine dining establishment. Next came Angel, Thierry Mugler’s 90s drag princess, equal parts dominant daddy and little girl. Technically a patchouli in the heart, Angel opens like snorting children’s toothpaste.

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Like Poison and Angel before it, Baccarat Rouge 540 is strong enough to smell on the moon. Also like them, it is sweet. Unlike them, this sweetness is shaped and flattened somehow. Smoothed. One imagines Kurkdijan in a hellfire forge, hammering molasses and maple syrup and the crystalline tops of every crème brulé ever made before lifting history’s greatest burnt sugar note to gleam, shiny and hard, in the light of a well-earned sunrise. 540 is the classic example of what the late fragrance writer Conor McTeague called Kurkdijan’s “precious metal glow.”

You may not grasp the appeal, but you cannot deny the presence—mysterious, awesome, seductively inhospitable—of seamless, ruthless technical perfection. Salted caramel, but make it Bauhaus. What if desert, but Le Corbusier. It smells like money the way Crassus did after being forced to drink hot gold; it foregrounds the lethal temerity of overaccumulation that has, in the decades since Angel and Poison, consumed more and more of public life. And that is the difference between Kurkdijan and those who came before him: in the same way Chinatown is a film noir that is about noir and also—somehow!—the best noir, Kurkdijan makes fragrance about fragrance.

In this sense he was the perfect person to create a flanker of the world’s best-selling perfume. And Sauvage Eau Forte is not the first time he has remixed an established hit. He lightened and brightened Pierre Bourdon’s bathouse epic Kouros all the way back in 2003. “But there was only one Kouros,” he said, while there were already four versions of Sauvage when it came time for him to add his own.

I was worried whether Kurkdijan would be able to cut through the baggage that Sauvage in particular and masculinity in general has accumulated. But I can report that Sauvage Eau Forte smells good.

It smells really, really good, actually, in a sparkling, clean, classical way. Not least because, in a revolutionary change that may become industry standard, Eau Forte is based in water rather than alcohol. This means that it opens immediately, without the typical five to six second wait for the scent of raw ethanol to burn off. Gone entirely are the Giorgio Moroder shield-generator synths and cyborg sperm-whale palpitations of the earlier Sauvages. In their place is a sharp, vivid lavender that is sober and smart without being joyless or corporate. It does not smell like a hangover, it smells the way someone who didn’t drink last night looks to someone who did, enviable and wise.

If there is a pinch of sadness to be found smelling Eau Forte, it is that its intelligence seems also to indicate, in a negative way, just how ridiculous men had let themselves get there, for a minute. If slavery, as Plato has it, is what happens when we are doomed to chase whatever instinctual desire happens to enter our conscious perception, and freedom, by contrast, is the capacity to regard these lures coolly and with maximum discernment, then Francis Kurkdijan’s Sauvage Eau Forte smells like freedom, because it smells like a man in control of himself.

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