Hypnotic Poison extends the Poison line in 1998, born thirteen years earlier, by shifting the venomous towards the gourmand. Annick Menardo built it on bitter almond, whose biting bitterness stands up to the vanilla and sandalwood of the base. The opening is fruity — coconut, plum and apricot — before a heart of sambac jasmine, tuberose and rose lifted with caraway. The bottle takes up the house's red apple, a forbidden fruit turned signature.
An olfactory dessert held by a metallic musk for Bois de Jasmin, a medicinal and stifling almond for Perfume Shrine: the fragrance still divides.
Olfastory’s review
Bois de Jasmin, 2005
Victoria Frolova sees an olfactory dessert in it: spices folded into a jasmine cream, crossed by a metallic note. Where Poison shocked, this one takes its time and plays slow seduction.
She describes a cloud of icing sugar settled on a base of musk and vanilla, and a musk that is almost austere, clean and metallic, whose contrast with the bitterness of the almond holds the gourmand back.
Perfume Shrine, September 2018
Elena Vosnaki tells the opposite. The bitter almond frightened her at first, too strong and on the wrong side of medicinal; she found the whole thing heavily vanillic, with something stifling about it, whose culprit she finally named: vanilla married to coconut.
Persolaise, 15 January 2023
Dariush Alavi takes the fragrance up for its twenty-fifth year and places it back in its line, thirteen years after Poison and four years after Tendre Poison, the third ridged bottle in the catalogue.
He asks the awkward question: without access to Dior's batch codes, it becomes hard to say which bottle holds Menardo's composition and which holds François Demachy's retouches.