Christian Dior Poison Review – The Favourites – Edouard Flechier & Jean Guichard; 1985

Poison is many things. I suspect that’s why I’ve always avoided writing about it at any great depth. Its multi-levelled enormity in my mind has been so paralysing that I’ve had to shy away from confronting it. But for some reason, it feels as though the time has finally arrived to face up to its glorious toxicity and formulate some semi-coherent thoughts on its might and power. To help me move into the right zone, I shall start with a spritz of my esprit de parfum bottle: a precious internet find from a few years ago. A sniff. And the ride begins. 

Poison is a person. This is always my first response, no matter how many times I smell the scent. Indeed, it is a very specific person: my maternal grandmother, who lived in Warsaw for as long as I knew her and who was almost entirely faithful to what she lovingly called ‘Trucizna’ (the Polish word for ‘poison’). It suited her well, with its uncompromising, room-filling assertiveness and its embrace of spiky materials. My mum kept her well stocked with it, always giving her at least one bottle each time we flew over from the Middle East to spend summers in Poland. I can still see her applying a few sprays to her neck, just after clipping on some earrings and adjusting her hat, ready to head off to the Lazienki park for an open-air Chopin concert.  

Poison is a moment in a place. As it’s so strongly connected to my grandmother, the fragrance is also evocative of the entire period of my life when ‘home’ was the UAE, but flying to Poland was paradoxically described with the term ‘going back’, thereby creating an issue around the concept of ‘home’ that I have yet to resolve. This was a time in the Polish narrative when martial law was a recent memory and children often picked up on snatches of worried, frightened conversations between adults. And yet it was also a time when many seemed to be propelled by the conviction that real change wasn’t far away. A time when flashing a Matchbox car on a Mokotow playground was enough to make you the coolest kid in the neighbourhood. And a time when, somehow, queuing for eight hours to buy a few rolls of bristly toilet paper while you were in Eastern Europe was just as normal as flinging as many rolls as you wanted into your trolley at Spinney’s on King Faisal Street in Sharjah. So many different normals. So many different homes. All infused with the same scent.

Poison is a ghost. In fact, every perfume is a ghost. Instinctively, we all know that. I’ve long thought this is a key factor in their appeal: they conjure the past whilst also remaining within it. They are composed of death, and they bring the dead to life. But for me, Poison possesses an especially haunting quality. The person with whom I connect it is gone. That particular version of Warsaw is gone. The UAE, as it was, is long, long gone. The dynamics that connected me to those places and to certain people have altered and shifted beyond all recognition. I smell the perfume and I marvel at how many lives can exist inside one single person. How many deaths and rebirths. How many transformations. How many ghosts.

Poison is an epiphany. Aside from all the intangible, quasi-metaphysical musings I’ve tried to describe, Poison also marked an important moment in my own fragrance journey. It was the first time I became truly aware of a perfume as more than a scent. Of course, until its release, I’d known all about these gorgeous smelling things that my parents and their friends used to spray on themselves. But Poison was different. Together with Ridley Scott’s TV ad for Chanel No. 5, it helped me begin to understand that perfume could capture an idea: that it could reflect something about us that words and images and sounds could not. Of course, back then there was no way I could articulate this. But I have no doubt that some part of me began to grasp it when Poison was released: when the poster and the advert (with its haunting, propulsive soundtrack) and the ubiquitousness of the whole thing (for a while, it felt as though every single shop in Dubai reeked of the stuff) came together to overwhelm my impressionable little mind.

And finally, Poison is a beauty. We don’t say this enough. Actually, we don’t say it enough about all the greats. No. 5. Shalimar. Opium. They have become so iconic that we often forget what made them special in the first place. And although Poison has now become the punching-bag of choice when people want to make fun of 80s excesses and bemoan how ‘nauseating’ all those scents were, and how ‘selfish’ it was of people to wear them to dinner, I’d suggest that it’s important to silence the naysayers and re-appraise the fragrance on its own terms.

It is perhaps one of the last truly great abstract compositions of perfumery. We casually tend to call it a tuberose, but compare it to modern tuberoses, and you see how non-figurative it really is. Certainly, tuberose is in there, gleaming with intent like the skin of the witch in Snow White. But there is so much more. Cinnamon. Rose. Berries. Plum. Honey! (How come nobody ever mentions the honey?) Pepper. Vanilla. Musks. And so much more. A bone fide unique blend that somehow, under the genius of Edouard Flechier and Jean Guichard, managed to be both tender and wicked, steely and soft, lethal and comforting. It captured the imagination of so many people, cuttings across borders and cultures and divides. It became – and remains – so many different things to so many different individuals. A shapeshifter. A rule-breaker. An uncompromising diva. Poisonous to its purple core. And yet endlessly – and gloriously – life-giving. I doubt we shall ever see its like again.

Persolaise

[Dior Poison review based on a sample obtained by me.]

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