Before there was a fragrance, there was a stone.
Jade — chalchihuitl in Nahuatl — was the most precious material in the ancient Mayan world. More valued than gold. More sacred than silver. The Maya carved it into masks for their rulers, placed it in the mouths of the dead to guide their journey, and used it to mark the boundaries between the human world and the divine. Green like the jungle. Cold to the touch. Holding a light inside it that seems to come from somewhere deeper than its surface.
It was this stone, and the civilization that venerated it, that became the origin of Jade Maya.
Chiapas: Where the Jungle Keeps Its Secrets
The ruins of Izapa — the archaeological site that gives our brand its name — sit in the foothills of the Sierra Madre in Chiapas, near the border with Guatemala. They are among the oldest ceremonial sites in Mesoamerica, predating the Classic Maya period, with carved stelae that record astronomical knowledge and mythological narratives that scholars are still working to fully understand.
The jungle around them is alive in a way that is difficult to describe if you have not stood inside it. Dense, layered, with a humidity you can feel on your skin before you have taken three steps from the path. The smell of vegetation so green it almost has a color — lemon grass and citrus on the air, vetiver rising from the earth, something warmer and more animal beneath all of it.
This is the landscape Jade Maya was built from. Not the ruins as architecture, but the ruins as atmosphere. The feeling of standing somewhere that has been sacred for three thousand years and still is.
The Language of Jade in Fragrance
Translating a civilization's most sacred material into a fragrance is an act of interpretation, not imitation. What our perfumers at a world-renowned French fragrance house with generations of fine perfumery craft sought to capture was not jade the stone, but jade the idea. Vitality. Freshness. Spiritual energy. Something unisex and universal that still carries a specific sense of place.
The top notes open with lemon and bergamot — bright, transparent, the kind of freshness that feels like moving air in a jungle clearing. The heart is where Jade Maya reveals its character: vetiver grounds the fragrance in something ancient and earthy, saffron adds warmth and an almost imperceptible smokiness, and ginger brings the energy of jade itself. The result is a fragrance that reads as fresh on first encounter but deepens with time.
The Quote That Grounds It
For the Jade Maya collection, we invited the novelist Laura Esquivel — author of Like Water for Chocolate, one of the defining voices in Mexican literature — to write something that captured the spirit of the fragrance. She gave us this:
The light touch of feet as they walk through the agave fields on nights of a full moon is an infallible spell to open oneself to the world like a lemon blossom.
There is something in Jade Maya that opens. That invites. That makes a room feel like a place worth being.
A Fragrance for Spaces That Matter
Jade Maya is the signature scent across InterContinental hotels in Mexico — chosen because it carries cultural weight with effortless elegance. That is the ambition behind every piece of the collection: to make Mexico present in the finest spaces in the world, through a fragrance complex enough to reward attention and approachable enough to be loved on first encounter.
Discover the Jade Maya collection — including hand soap, body lotion, shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel.
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IZAPA is a Mexican luxury fragrance brand. Our fine fragrances are created in partnership with a world-renowned French fragrance house, formulated to be 100% vegan, cruelty-free, and free of parabens and phthalates. Made in Mexico.