Bitter almond is a difficult note to build a perfume around. It reads as marzipan to some noses and as cough syrup to others, and it can tip into cherry or nail varnish if the perfumer pushes too hard. Francis Kurkdjian has pushed all the way in for Dior Paradise, the newest release in La Collection Privée, and the gamble mostly pays off.

The story Dior tells is about a place. Christian Dior kept an estate in Provence, the Château de La Colle Noire, where more than a hundred almond trees flowered at the end of winter and where he mixed evening cocktails sweetened with orgeat, the almond-and-barley syrup. Kurkdjian, who now runs perfume creation at the house, set out to bottle that orchard. He calls the heart of the fragrance "an irresistible almond biscuit," which tells you where the whole thing is headed before you spray it.

On skin it opens bright and fizzy. Mandarin, orange and lime, a citrus triptych pitched at the orgeat cocktail rather than the fruit bowl. The almond comes up underneath, creamy and faintly bitter, and roasted tonka bean carries the base into a warm, biscuity softness with a little dry wood behind it. Sweet, but not a dessert. It also lasts. Wearers keep reporting the same figure, five to six hours of real projection before it drops to a skin scent, which is above average for something this fresh and citrus-forward.

The presentation matches the pitch. The juice photographs like syrup, amber against woven gold, and the summer edition arrives in a cannage case that Jonathan Anderson, now running Dior couture, reworked from the house's old caning motif in sun-bleached colours. It is a great deal of sunshine for one shelf.

Kurkdjian has been busy at Dior. Since taking over creation he has put out Bois Talisman and Dior Cuir Saddle among others, and Paradise fits the run: polished, legible, built to be liked. Whether that reads as range or repetition depends on how charitable you feel about a house perfumer with a lot of shelf space to fill.

Reception has been warm rather than reverent. It sits around 3.65 out of five on Fragrantica, a decent score and not a great one for a private-collection release, and the split underneath that number is the interesting part. Casual buyers love it, the easy, happy, wear-anywhere summer scent that sells itself off a first sniff. The enthusiasts are cooler. Some hear a reworking of Cologne Blanche, an older Dior that never really sold; others compare the opening to a vintage Dolce & Gabbana men's cologne built on the same synthetic woody-citrus base. One commenter rolled his eyes at the marketing altogether, noting how easy it is to mine a dead couturier for a backstory.

The price sorts the argument out. In the UK, Paradise starts at £175 for the 50ml and climbs to £255 for the 100ml, the size where the per-millilitre maths stops being punishing. That is Collection Privée money, and the line has always charged a premium for rarity and boutique-only distribution as much as for the juice inside. What the premium buys here is a scent engineered to please on contact, which is a strange thing to want from a collection built on the promise that it won't.

So yes, the almond can be had stranger, darker and cheaper, and a dozen smaller houses will sell you one for a third of £255. Paradise isn't for the people who want that. It's for the person who sprays it, feels the sun come up, and buys the 100ml on the spot.

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