Diorissimo

Diorissimo enters the Parfums Christian Dior catalog in 1956. Edmond Roudnitska composes it a year after Eau Fraîche, and the couturier dies the following year.

Lily of the valley is Christian Dior's flower. Stéphan recalls that it ran as a thread through his collections, that he wore it in his buttonhole whenever he could, and that he gave it to his seamstresses as well as to his clients.

A flower that cannot be distilled

Lily of the valley yields nothing to distillation: its odor is too fleeting to be captured. The perfumer must rebuild it from scratch, and that is where the difficulty of the subject lies.

Roudnitska achieves this, Stéphan writes, through lily, amaryllis, lilac, boronia, and jasmine, in the manner of the English in their lily of the valley waters, but carrying the flower into a bouquet that is deep, powerful, and almost theatrical.

The Cabris garden

Stéphan reports that Roudnitska interpreted the lily of the valley from his own garden, in Cabris, in the hills above Grasse. The fragrance comes from a flower observed closely, season after season.

What changes on October 1, 2026

Diorissimo is among the thirteen fragrances that Francis Kurkdjian restores under the name Dioriginals. He holds it to be an immense classic, still taught today in perfumery schools worldwide.

A marvel of balance, grace, and simplicity, he says: half figuration, half abstraction, the portrait of a nature carried to another degree.

To recapture this floral, Kurkdjian says he restored the entire white lily of the valley accord and worked on a new quality of jasmine, which allowed him to render its original color and aura.

The Ovale bottle will house all thirteen: clear glass, half-sphere cap, white cord tied at the neck, designed in 1948 by Serge Heftler-Louiche.