Marc Jacobs’s Daisy Love Is Malibu Beach and Sun-Warmed Skin in a Bottle

Daisy Love, the latest sequel to Marc Jacobs’s Daisy, is Beach Blanket Bingo in a bottle. “Actually, the inspiration was California—Malibu’s beaches,” says master perfumer Alberto Morillas about his third incarnation of the original. “It’s very American.” While the first Daisy is pastoral, verdant and meadowy—conjuring The Virgin Suicides girls in gauzy dresses lying around in a clearing and plaiting one another’s hair—this version takes Daisy, embodied by Kaia Gerber, and her friends to the seaside. It’s late afternoon, the breeze and the heat are dying down and the air is mellow and golden. It’s happy hour, in the grandest sense of the phrase, and the big dimmer switch in the sunlit sky has just been turned on. “It’s a moment of joy, youth and insouciance,” says Morillas, who invoked this scene of carefree hedonism centred around daisy-tree petals from the Galapagos Islands.

In the fragrance, the scent of the petals is framed by a top note of effervescent cloudberries, subtly sweet and mysterious, and base notes of driftwood (appropriate, given the beach theme) and cashmere musk. “It’s a cocktail of musks that gives the sensation of sun-warmed skin,” says Morillas. “When you wear it, you feel this douceur, this gentleness, without it being clingy.”

Inspired by water, Daisy Love naturally has an aquatic feel, but this is a perfume for bikini-clad sunbathers, not swimmers. There is none of the brine and tanginess of a classic marine fragrance—only the sensuality and hedonism of bare skin.

The different Daisy scents form a storyline, though Daisy herself, of course, never gets older. She stays the same, with the fragrances capturing her “at different moments and different contexts in her life,” says Morillas. “It took me a long time to do the research and find a way to interpret this magical ambience in an abstract way.” There is nothing abstract about the success that Daisy Love is bound to be, however. It will be a summer scent that lasts all year long.