ZADIG & VOLTAIRE
ZADIG EDP

2025

PERFUMER
Amandine Clerc-Marie
Florian Gallo

white sesame
black sesame
ginger

orange blossom
neroli

sandalwood
vanilla

Awesome bottle? I think so. Generally a good and underrated collection of fragrances? I think so. But this is not Zadig & Voltaire’s best work in my opinion. In fact, I found it to be quite a let down.

Straight away, you skip over almost all of the freshness. The faint hint of citrussy quality is nice and needed, but it’s not enough. Usually neroli is something that can be overpowering, but here, the overall scent is much more on the sweet and powdery side. It has that typical, dry, almost sharp dry orange blossom, with what to my nose smells like almond or some sort of nutty sweetness.

I don’t love the scent, but I especially feels like the textures let Zadig EDP down here. You get some of the scent of that milky sandalwood vibe that some of the other Zadig & Voltaire releases stood out for, but instead of the matching texture, it varies from powdery to dry to airy. Even the citrussy element feels dried; like some old-school smelling lemon powder.

Picture almond (what I assume is to be the sesame) with a small tinge of women’s designer florals. It smells very familiar to my nose, but I can’t grasp what other fragrances it reminds me of most.

It’s not a terrible overall experience or anything; the scent is still a notch above probably the majority of what I find in your average Sephora-style store, but it doesn’t do anything for me either. It feels like a rather generic, sweet, nutty and earthy scent, which to its credit, feels right down the middle unisex. However, I don’t think it’s as good as most of the This Is… fragrances, either for Him or for Her.

While decent overall, it feels uninspired and as other early reviews have pointed out: Outdated. This does not reinvent the wheel in any way, but falls back on existing and familiar hallmarks to bring together a male and female audience. In a way, not by scent, but by sentiment, this release reminds me of something akin to YSL Myslf, which felt like taking the Libre DNA and making it more masculine, for one of the most impersonal fragrances ever released despite its name. Here, Zadig seemingly scraped some loose ends together to make an adequate, sweet, character-void blend that is a lot less interesting than the glass it resides in.