I started writing this post a few times with “When i was a kid I had a Dior perfume I loved and I’ve been looking for it since” and I was woah, that makes me sound like some rich kid. “Oh yes dahling, Mumsy weaned me on Chanel and dangled a Faberge egg mobile over my designer crib!”
My aunt gave me for a birthday a bottle of Dior perfume that I assume was an unwanted gift or that she’d bought on a trip to Lithuania. Or someone gave her for some reason. I don’t know, honestly. I liked having it, it was super special, and I used it up over a number of years.
The perfumes I had as a kid were things like 4711 and Avon, and in uni, body shop oils, that cost about $12 and lasted years; I did save up and get some things duty free on the one trip we did out of Australia.
So to go back to the bit which now I hope doesn’t make me sound like an entitled wanker (!) – I had a bottle of french perfume as a kid – maybe I was 12 or 15? that I used up and liked.
The smell I can only describe as: unexpected, conflicting, and somehow, sour but also edible. That is what my 1980s teen brain thought of it. Oh the days before fragrancia.
Now the problem.
- I knew it was called Diorsomethingorother. But I didn’t know what the somethingorother bit was. I narrowed it down to Diorella, Dioressence, or Diorissimo. I think there’s more. I also have a bottle of Miss Dior. Dior seems to be a bit obsessed with their own name, but sure, why not.
- Perfumes have been reformulated up the wazoo and so the smell I remember might not exist today
- Vintage Dior perfumes come up relatively often on ebay but they are costly and I didn’t want to do blind buys just in CASE
As mentioned in an earlier post, I got a mini vintage bottle of Dioressence, thinking that was probably the name I wanted. It was nice, but it didn’t have any triggers to the smell I remembered. Though the bottle had ‘turned’ a bit and so could have just….been that. I was unsure but not convinced. I bought a 5ml decant sample of new Dioressence and it frankly smells like watered down modern terrible patchouli ass. Ergh. What a waste of my ten bucks.
I bought a decant sample of vintage Diorella but I was ALMOST certain that was not the perfume I was looking for, which left Diorissimo.
Then a bottle of vintage Diorissimo turned up for sale in the same week I got paid.
Given I have on-sold perfumes with no loss of $ because they keep their value, I took a gamble and bought it.
The decant Diorella and the Diorissimo turned up the same day. Diorella, I have never smelled before. It’s lemony and creamy and strange and quite beautiful, but I won’t be getting more when I’ve used up the sample
The winner is Diorissimo. I FOUND IT! That was it, the combination of tangy green, powerhouse white floral, and dirty filthy background skank, all vying for attention.
WOOOOOOOOOO! Been wearing it non stop for days. WOOOO! Thank goodness, though, that was…not cheap, and could have ended poorly!
