Le Beau Paradise Garden
Jean Paul Gaultier (2024)

Stunningly good summer scent. If you like coconut and fig you will love this scent. Great longevity and decent silage. Best release of 2024 with Le Male Lover a close second.

Le Beau Paradise Garden by Jean Paul Gaultier (2024) is a lighter, airier, slightly saltier take on the original Le Beau by Jean-Paul Gaultier (2019). Oddly enough, Calvin Klein released something suspiciously just like this, but much more low-key and likely not to get as much attention under the Calvin Klein Eternity for Men (1989) flanker range. That scent, called Eternity Aromatic Essence by Calvin Klein (2024) feels like it might have been a mod of this project, or the original Le Beau, notwithstanding. In the case of Gaultier's own attempt to further milk this DNA, we can see some fig and mint grafted into the Le Beau composition of sweetened vanillic coconut and tonka, and it's marginally better than the cut-rate CK flanker. Of course, saying your perfume is marginally better than a floundering competitor's throwaway flankers is not an accomplishment.

The claimed aquatic elements are here only in the abstract, with the mint and fig notes being buried in tons of ethyl maltol sweetness, ginger, and vanilla. The starring coconut is still the main attraction for those who love this sort of thing, with the only noteworthy difference being a little less cloying in high heat situations, with a non-committal amount of salt and green notes, enough to push this gently out of clubber range into the usual youthful one-size-fits-all category, but only barely so. The "tonka fog" that another friend mentioned being the hallmark of this range under stewardship of Quentin Bisch is still here, and that makes Le Beau a no-go for those not enamored with such a heavy-handed usage. Performance is good, and I suppose it had better be considering the buyer of these fragrances nowadays.

At the end of the day, this is another here today, gone tomorrow flanker of the Le Beau range, already itself being supplemental to the original Le Mâle by Jean-Paul Gaultier (1995), itself growing too weird, wonderful, iconoclastic, and emblematic of queer culture for the target market being pursued by JPG fragrances these days. That once controversial torso bottle now seen as more emblematic of the user's ego than any sort of subversive sexual energy like it once did. Adding the little fig leaves to the Le Beau bottles always felt like a "Disneyfication" of the range to me, although now that there is an actual fig note in one of these flankers, I guess it finally fits... so to speak. Not my cup of tea, and not even done all that well or in a way I could at least say is satisfactory, I have no choice but to go call this one a miss. Thumbs down.