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Two Sisters, One Perfect Pear
Read time: 6 minutes
There is something inherently special about sisters – the shorthand, the shared history, the sync that requires no explanation. In the case of activist and model Lizzy and model Georgia May Jagger – daughters of Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger, two fixtures of modern pop-cultural mythology – sisterhood comes with a distinctly British flourish. Think wildflowers, irreverent humour, festival mud and, if you ask them, a frankly irrational craving for cheese & onion crisps whenever they’re abroad. It makes them well-suited to Jo Malone London’s latest celebration of English Pear & Freesia and English Pear & Sweet Pea – two takes on a quintessentially British icon told through contrasting temperaments. ‘Two sisters, one perfect pear’ feels entirely apt.
For Lizzy, Jo Malone London entered her life as part of the fabric of her home: ‘Our mother had the really big candles in the hallway. All the scents became familiar to me and quite cosy. And later, they would always remind me of home in London.’ Georgia May feels similarly: ‘I always had the candles and fragrances, years before working with Jo Malone London. I really love the identity of the brand. It’s very my kind of style, and I love the way they bring natural elements into the fragrances.’
If English Pear feels particularly British, that was the intention. ‘A Jo Malone London fragrance always begins with a story,’ says Céline Roux, the brand’s Global Head Of Fragrance. I especially love English orchards – there is something charming about the end of summer when you have orchards full of fruit trees. That was the idea behind our English Pear scents. We wanted to capture that moment. It felt romantic.’
Scent is, inevitably, about memory – and for Georgia May, also about ritual. ‘It’s such an important part of feeling like you’re ready to go out,’ she says. ‘I also think of fragrances that my mum had or how friends smell. You smell something and it takes you to a place or time.’ For Lizzy, the resonance is literal: ‘I genuinely love sweet peas. My mum grows them and when we go to her house she puts little bouquets everywhere.’ She links them to her sister too: ‘The smell of a sweet pea does invoke Georgia May because it’s our mum’s favourite flower and we’ve spent so much time around them.’ For Céline, English Pear & Sweet Pea was the natural second chapter to the English Pear collection. ‘We wanted to reinterpret the pear through another flower. Sweet peas are playful and pastel and freesias are elegant and long. For me, the two flowers felt like sisters.’
‘Sweet peas are playful and pastel and freesias are elegant and long. For me, the two flowers felt like sisters’
The campaign sidesteps the usual fragrance theatrics. ‘I love images of two women together having fun,’ Lizzy says. ‘There’s something very natural and real about that. A lot of fragrance images are very polished and maybe not something you can project yourself into. Jo Malone London feels real.’ Georgia May nods: ‘We were just ourselves, the way we were styled and everything,’ she says, laughing. ‘We weren’t on a set with wind machines.’
That commitment to authenticity extended to the lab. ‘Natural pear didn’t exist in perfumery – it was mostly water,’ explains Céline. ‘I wanted a natural pear and everyone told me it was impossible. So we looked to the food industry where they make pear juice and saw that the steam from cooking pears is usually thrown away. We captured that steam water and concentrated it to create a natural pear extract – an upcycled ingredient.
It took two years. At one point we had 0.82 of a pear in every bottle and we said, “No, no, we need a full pear.” So we concentrated again until we could say one pear in every bottle. Things like that make my job fun. It’s craftsmanship and we like to challenge what’s possible.’
Both sisters agree on the importance of challenging each other to be better. ‘Georgia has always been sportier than me – we go on holiday and we end up hiking up a hill,’ laughs Lizzy but it is never, says Georgia May, ‘about competition. Beyond being sisters, it’s the coming together of women and supporting each other and championing what each other is doing.’ It is a genuine love for each other that means their relationship has never been organised around rivalry. The age difference, they say, also makes a difference. ‘We’re seven-and-a-half years apart,’ explains Georgia May, ‘so we’ve had several different relationships in our relationship as sisters.’
‘Beyond being sisters, it’s the coming together of women and supporting each other and championing what each other is doing’
Their memories are affectionate and beautifully comic in the way sibling memories often are. Georgia May laughs as she recalls ‘being by the pool and Lizzy pretending to push me around in a beach chair as a baby in a pram,’ and also the matching outfits: ‘Even though we were seven-and-a-half years apart, our mother used to dress us in matching outfits. I was thrilled. For Lizzy it was probably more like, “why am I matching my five-year-old sister?” Lizzy’s memory is of Easter: ‘Holding her hand on an Easter egg hunt in matching ruffled dresses. I just remember thinking we were so cute.’ Taste has become their shared language as adults. ‘We have a similar sense of humour,’ Georgia May says, ‘and similar taste in music, probably because Lizzy gave me much of mine.’ Their differences are benign and, arguably, convenient. ‘Georgia May can take things a bit more seriously than me,’ Lizzy admits. ‘I’m more like everything’s a bit of a joke. But I’m really detail-orientated and Georgia May is more of a big-picture person.’ Nevertheless, they inspire each other: ‘She’s very outspoken in her beliefs’, says Georgia May, her voice filled with pride.
While both sisters have, at some point in their lives, lived in America (unsurprising seeing as their mother, Jerry Hall, is originally from Texas) it sharpened their Britishness rather than diluted it. ‘Living in America as a British person makes you crave things you didn’t know you loved,’ Georgia May says. ‘Cheese & onion crisps, certain TV shows. Watching Bake Off.’ Lizzy admits, ‘I once drove an hour in LA to the English snack shop.’ Festivals are part of the cultural calculus too. ‘There’s Coachella, yes, but we love Glastonbury,’ Lizzy says. The usually bad weather is immaterial. ‘We don’t care if it’s raining. It’s almost better because it doesn’t smell as bad,’ she adds, laughing.
Céline recognises the phenomenon from a different angle: ‘My advantage as a French person is that I take such enjoyment from English life: pears, orchards, summer light, flowers that grow wild, and so on.’
There is a sense of that captured in the campaign. But what it also captures is the way two interpretations of the same thing can coexist without needing to be the same. And as Georgia May says, smiling, her signature gap on show: ‘We just get to have fun.’
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