Business hotels aren’t designed to inspire passion. They’re efficient and bland. They mean to please without offending. Their restaurants are equally uninspiring, with menus full of chicken caesar salads and farmed salmon filets. The hospitality punches in at the time clock inside the basement service entrance. But, boy, do they turn rooms.

You know where I’m going with this. To me, today’s Christian Dior J’Adore gives the same feeling as a middle-tier business hotel. It does a perfume’s job of smelling pretty and clean, but comes off as oddly soulless. Yet, it sells like gangbusters…

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