Launched in 2016 in La Collection Privée Christian Dior, La Colle Noire bears the name of the château Christian Dior bought in the early 1950s in the Pays de Fayence, near Grasse. François Demachy built it on the May rose; today the house describes a plump, piquant rose, knotted with spices and woods over a patchouli base.
Portia (Australian Perfume Junkies) smells a watercolor rose, measured and discreet; Isabelle Cerboneschi (ALL-I-C), a pure, fresh rose with nothing syrupy about it.
Olfastory’s review
Australian Perfume Junkies: a watercolor rose
On May 19, 2016, Portia describes an opening of sheer, wet, bright rose, already musky, whose brilliance fades within a few minutes. What remains is a sweet, hazy rose, like a second rose water lightly warmed, floating around her as in a garden in the early morning.
She finds the fragrance so measured and careful that it would fit among Chanel’s Les Exclusifs: beautiful, fragile, a watercolor wash, elegant and discreet, for anyone who wants to smell of luxury without asserting anything. She hears in it a shapeless murmur.
ALL-I-C: a rose sculpted in ice
On December 31, 2021, Isabelle Cerboneschi finds neither mawkishness nor syrup in it: a clean, fresh rose, “as if sculpted in ice,” with a delicacy she likens to a couture gown in silk tulle.
She reads in it François Demachy’s tribute to the couturier’s universe and to the estate he loved, an invitation to visit Christian Dior’s secret world in thought.