Last year, a family-owned shop in northern Italy yielded a few vintage treasures (click here for my video on the goodies I bought there). And this summer, the town of Monreale in Sicily (if you ever find yourself there, do not leave without visiting the cathedral!) was the place where I was persuaded to exchange my pennies for a couple of well-preserved old bottles: an edt of Dior Diorella and a limited edition of Dior Higher from 2002. I unsealed both of them live on YouTube a few days ago. Here’s a link to the episode: vintage Dior Diorella and Higher reviews.
I realise Higher is generally considered to represent a low point in Dior’s scented output, but I’ve always been fond of it, so I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to add an original-formulation bottle to my collection. Yes, there’s an overt chemical-ness in the pear-like opening, but to my nose, it works well, in a curiously sci-fi, androgynous-android way. Plus, it’s interesting to consider it as a precursor of sorts to Hermes H24, which employs similarly glass-metallic notes to create a sense of sleek urban vistas.
And as for Diorella — what more is there to say? As joyful a composition as any that’s ever been made, it represents everything that’s best about Edmond Roudnitska’s style: the pitch-perfect handling of the citrus notes; the smiling, weightless optimism of the jasmine; and the unashamedly idiosyncratic presentation of the chypre base, somewhere between stewed vegetables and a forest floor covered in a spongy layer of moss. It is masterpieces like this that remind us why we became passionate about perfume in the first place.
Persolaise
[Dior Diorella and Higher reviews based on vintage samples obtained by me in 2023.]
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