J’Adore Intense: turning up Dior’s golden heat

Love on the brain, or maybe it is just the gleam of liquid gold. The new J’Adore Intense lands with that familiar cinematic glow, and hearing Francis Kurkdjian talk about it feels like watching a precision jeweler reset a classic stone. The brief seems obvious at first glance, amplify the signature, but Kurkdjian rarely does obvious. He edits, he clarifies, he turns light into texture.

If you speak fluent J’Adore, you know the code. J’Adore is sunshine on satin, a bright white floral built on jasmine, ylang-ylang, and polished musks. The recent offshoots sketched the spectrum beautifully, J’Adore Parfum d’Eau was a misty silk blouse, cool and petal-soft, J’Adore Infinissime was a wilder bloom with tuberose swagger, J’Adore L’Or under Kurkdjian went full couture, a concentrate of absolutes that melted on skin. So where does J’Adore Intense belong in this wardrobe.

Intense, in Kurkdjian’s vocabulary, usually means more radiance, not more noise. I am expecting a denser solar heart that clings, jasmine and ylang warmed into a golden hum, orange blossom turned luminous, a touch of vanilla-amber rounding the edges without tipping into sugar. If there is fruit, it should be ripe only at the rim, no syrupy top notes dragging the hemline. The trail, I bet, will be satin-long and skin-glowing, not a club fog.

Do we need another J’Adore. Only if it says something real on skin. The allure here is the tension between iconic polish and physical closeness, that moment when a bouquet steps off the pedestal and breathes at body temperature. If J’Adore Intense leans too far into generic woody ambers, it will lose its lineage. If it keeps the white florals plush and lit from within, it could become the after-dark twin I have been missing.

I wore the original J’Adore through job interviews and first dates, it was my gold-plated armor. I want J’Adore Intense to be the same armor after midnight, a little warmer, a little closer, still unmistakably Dior. First proper wear test coming as soon as I can get it under a sleeve. Until then, consider my expectations set to a slow, confident simmer.