I do not like anything old: I enjoy looking at antique furniture in museums but wouldn’t want to see it in my living room. I acknowledge the significance of black and white classical movies but the only one that I actually like and wouldn’t mind watching again is Twelve Angry Men. I’m completely unemotional about art deco posters. And, as a rule, I do not like vintage perfumes.
How did it happen that I’ve bought this 7.5 ml half-full bottle of vintage Miss Dior parfum? Why did I decide to buy my first vintage perfume? I didn’t. I didn’t buy a perfume. I bought that bottle. I bought a visual aid to one of my childhood memories.
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When I was nine my mother had three small bottles of Dior’s parfums – Diorella, Miss Dior and Dior-Dior. Out of these three Diorella in a blue box with white oval was my absolute favorite (see First Love: Love); Dior-Dior in a light beige box didn’t attract me much (it got discontinued, so I never had a chance later to check if my tastes changed); and Miss Dior in an elegant white box was somewhere in between. I don’t remember how any of them smelled, I just remember that imaginary hierarchy.
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When I was nineteen Miss Dior (I think, it was an eau de toilette version) became the first perfume I ever bought. It wasn’t my favorite perfume, I didn’t even remember how it smelled (at that time in the country where I lived perfume testers were out of question) but I saw it in a store (which on its own was a small miracle at that time) and remembered that I liked it, more or less, in my childhood. And those were reasons good enough to warrant the purchase. If it sounds like something strange and “from another life” – that’s because it was; you might want to look through my very first post in this blog First Love: Perfume to understand better my strange relationships with perfumes in my younger years. The bottle I bought was inserted into the golden metallic case (I haven’t seen that packaging after that here, it must have been either a limited or Europe-specific edition) and the box was still classy white. I didn’t love the perfume but liked it and used up the bottle.
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When I was Many-many years later I saw that Miss Dior bottle on eBay I realized that it looked not exactly but very close to the bottle from my childhood, one of those three that my mother used to have. And I wanted that bottle just for the bottle itself; I would have bought it even completely empty. But it still had some parfum left in it. And it smells wonderful on my skin – much better than I remember from my two previous encounters with Miss Dior. It is so smooth and warm that I feel wrapped into that scent every time I wear it. It is so beautiful that it makes me very sad to see how little of it I have left. Should I try to find another vintage bottle? What if it will be of a different formulation (I’m not sure from which decade is my bottle) and I do not like it? Should I try the current version before Dior butchered it again during the renaming and maybe “repatriation” process (read the horror story about the upcoming changes at Grain de Musc)? Which version? If EdT can be found still at Saks, I’ve never seen a tester for the parfum version. Should I buy unsniffed? What if I hate it? Questions, questions… One thing I do know: I will terribly miss Miss Dior if it’s gone.
If you’ve done a review for Miss Dior please post a link to it in your comment.
Image: my own
Posted by Undina 
