Joy, luxury fragrance within reach If Jean Patou founded his fashion house in 1914, success did not come until 1920. His matching sweaters and cardigans were immediately noticed, as was his first women's sportswear collection.
As the Jean Patou fashion house was booming, its founder decided to establish an eponymous perfume house. With the success of his three fragrances in 1925, signed by the great Henry Almeras, Jean Patou became as renowned a perfumer as he was a couturier. Yet it was with the creation of Joy, in 1929, that the house's perfumes achieved worldwide fame. It must be said that this luxurious and thoroughly floral perfume stood out in a postwar world where perfumes had become scarcer.
Joy, or the masterpiece of Patou's in-house perfumer Henry Almeras
Nothing would be too expensive or too beautiful for the Jean Patou perfume house! In fact, to launch his perfume house in the 1920s, Jean Patou went so far as to “steal” his talent from the house of Paul Poiret, Henry Almeras. Indeed, the leading perfume house, Poiret, was struggling to recover from successive wars and stock market crashes, and it was at that moment that Jean Patou chose to poach its in-house perfumer to bring him into his own service.
From the release in 1925 of Amour Amour, Que Sais-Je? and Adieu Sagesse, the in-house perfumer and his favorite couturier worked wonders. But nothing could have prepared them for the magnificent Joy, which would nevertheless be born amid a financial crisis unprecedented in the world. Better still, Jean Patou decided to make Joy an antidote to gloom and a snub to financial troubles by asking Henry Almeras to compose for him a fragrance using the most luxurious raw materials in the world.
The perfumer, inspired by the opulence and richness of Jean Patou's designs, thus composed a radiant and floral Joy in order to offer, in particular, to American women who could no longer travel to France to buy their Jean Patou attire, a bouquet of a thousand and one flowers that would console them for their sad fate…
The finest raw materials for the perfume said to be “the most expensive in the world”: Joy by Patou
After several trials, the master perfumer devised a bouquet blending the most precious, the rarest, and the most expensive scents. A bouquet that the couturier acclaimed… on the condition that its concentration be increased still further!
Thus Joy by Jean Patou would concentrate within its bottle all the finest flowers of the era: may roses, jasmine from Grasse, and Bulgarian roses were concentrated in the heart of Joy to such a degree that, according to legend, it took 10,600 jasmine flowers from Grasse and 28 dozen may roses for 30 ml of extract! The so-called patounade, this pairing of may rose and jasmine, the signature of every Jean Patou perfume, is thus framed in Joy by fruity aldehydic top notes and intense, sensual, even wild woody depths…
Symbol of a joy of living against all odds, a work of art and the privilege of stars… Joy is still, today, one of the most famous perfumes in the world. Cosmopolitan on Joy by Jean Patou.