Christian Dior, Poison, 100 ml. or 3.3 oz. flacon, Eau de Toilette, 1985, Paris, France ..

‘A woman’s perfume tells me more about her than her handwriting.’ So said Christian Dior, who was born in 1905, and who was one of the greatest-ever couturiers, but yet a man whose name is also synonymous, all over the world, with the art of perfume.

As design careers go, Christian Dior‘s didn’t start well. His parents, who lived in a grand villa on the Normandy coast, refused to let him attend a school of fine arts, telling him that it wouldn’t help him find a real job. He kept his parents quiet, initially, by enrolling for Paris’s Institute of Political Sciences, but little did his parents realise that this was also a door to Paris’s exotic night-life.

Dior drifted happily into the company of artists and writers who later went on to become among the greatest of their time, painter Christian Bérard, Jean Cocteau, poet Max Jacob and actor Marcel Herrand all became friends. And another arty friend asked Christian Dior, who really longed to be an artist himself, if he’d be interested in becoming a partner in his new gallery. With funding from Dior’s father, it went on to showcase works by Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Salvador Dalí, Joan Miro and Raoul Dufy, among many others, But sadly, the Wall Street crash of 1929 made for few buyers, and badly dented the Dior family fortunes, and this adventure ended when tuberculosis forced Christian Dior to leave Paris, in 1934.

On his return, post-recovery, an impoverished Dior looked for work. A friend suggested he take up fashion illustration; he dedicated himself to the task, studying the great designers such as Molyneux, Schiaparelli, and Lanvin, and his dress designs were sought out by couturier Robert Piguet. The paper Le Figaro gave Dior‘s vibrant sketches a weekly page, and his hat designs did well, too.

During the Second World War, Dior worked as a designer beneath couturier Lucien Lelong. On 12th February 1947, Christian Dior turned the austere post-wartime world on its head, creating the most headline-grabbing collection ever known. Overnight, Christian Dior‘s ‘New Look’, with its full, swirling skirts, wasp-waisted jackets and bold use of colour, became, as Vogue puts it, ‘catnip to a luxury-starved populace eager to return to the rituals of grooming and dressing up’.

But women didn’t just want to look good. They wanted to smell beautiful, too. Soon after the success of his ground-breaking New Look, Dior recalled, ‘Miss Dior was born. It was born of those Provençal evenings filled with fireflies when green jasmine serves as a counterpoint to the melody of the night and the earth.’

Christian Dior Poison is a legendary, sultry Oriental floral perfume launched in 1985, known for its complex, daring, and provocative scent profile combining spicy, fruity, and amber notes with prominent tuberose, honey, and plum, evolving into a deep, smoky, and woody dry-down. Created by perfumer Edouard Flechier, it became a sensation with its powerful and unforgettable signature that defied gender norms and led to the creation of several successful flanker fragrances, solidifying its status as an iconic "fragrant weapon" for seduction.

After testing approximately 800 scents created by independent perfumers, Dior selected a bombastic fragrance created by perfumier Edouard Flechier. It was a scent unlike any other with notes of wild berries, sandalwood, musk, jasmine, orange blossom, coriander, vetiver, pepper, cedar, cinnamon, rosewood, plum, heliotrope, tuberose, vanilla, rose de mai absolute, cistus labdanum and opopanax.

The bottle was researched in depth. A unique bottle was crafted for Poison and designed to look like forbidden fruit. The colour of the apple shaped bottle is a deep shade of amethyst, and the neck is gold with a crystal stopper. Dior developed a savvy marketing strategy based on the controversial name of Yves Saint Laurent's top-selling fragrance, Opium. In 1983, Dior licensed the name Poison.

Top notes are Plum, Wild Berries, Coriander, Anise and Brazilian Rosewood
Heart notes are Tuberose, Incense, White Honey, Cinnamon, Opoponax, Carnation, Jasmine, African Orange Flower and Rose
Base notes are Vanille, Amber, Sandalwood, Heliotrope, Vetiver and Virginia Cedar

Offered here is an absolutely pristine bottle of the original Poison in the Eau de Toilette format, never opened or used. I had to remove the outer cellophane wrapper to take the photographs. It comes in its original presentation box .. I don't usually offer perfumes from the 1980's, but this one is so special, and is one that I fell in love with back at the time ..