La Colle Noire

Christian Dior launched La Colle Noire in spring 2016 in La Collection Privée, Now Smell This reports, after Fève Délicieuse, released in 2015. Dior’s perfumer-creator at the time, François Demachy, built the composition on an absolute of centifolia rose, the May rose harvested around Grasse.

An estate in the Pays de Fayence

The fragrance takes its name from the château in Montauroux, in the Pays de Fayence, which Christian Dior bought in 1951 according to the house; Isabelle Cerboneschi, writing for ALL-I-C, dates the deed to October 25, 1950. There, she writes, the couturier grew May roses, jasmine, lavandin and olive trees.

The name comes from the terrain: “colle” means hill in the local speech, Isabelle Cerboneschi explains, while Jeanne Doré, writing for Auparfum, links the black of the name to the dark trees facing the château. The architect Andreï Svetchine led its restoration, which the couturier entrusted to him in 1955.

The couturier’s refuge

Christian Dior wanted to make it his true home, the house of a retirement where he would forget the couturier and become simply Christian again, he wrote in Christian Dior et moi, published in 1956. He died on October 23, 1957, and the estate was sold shortly after his death.

Parfums Christian Dior bought back the château in 2013 and restored it. François Demachy told Isabelle Cerboneschi that he insisted on replanting centifolia roses there, the starting point of a fragrance he meant as the translation of an atmosphere rather than of a building.

The rose of Grasse

At launch, Demachy said he was celebrating a May rose blended with spices, woods, amber and musks: a unique rose of Grasse, spicy and vigorous, without excess sweetness. Jeanne Doré notes a composition the house wanted “sunny, and not saccharine.”

Isabelle Cerboneschi reports that Demachy committed the house to two Grasse farms run by women, Domaine de Manon and Clos de Callian, to secure May rose and jasmine of high quality.

What the house says today

Dior now files La Colle Noire among the chypre fragrances of its collection, under the heading of a unisex eau de parfum with floral notes. The house sees in it an immersion in the château’s gardens, the portrait of a place and of its flower.

Its American page presents Christian Dior as a rose lover who had recreated at La Colle Noire a paradise of rosebushes reminding him of his childhood garden in Granville, a refuge far from the bustle of Paris.