Like so many perfumes aimed at teenagers, Miss Dior Chérie throws as much effort into marketing and packaging as it does into the scent. And why not? Teenage success is almost entirely measured in marketing and packaging.
When it comes to Miss Dior Chérie, the kids know the success signifiers when they see ‘em: the cool Sophia Coppola-directed commercial, the cute chunky bottle with the bow. They’re pretty much on board by the time they take their first sniff.
As far as these sweetie-pie scents go, Miss Dior Chérie does her job in a reasonably classy fashion. But not everyone is drinking the fruitchouli-flavored Kool-Aid. Posts from a couple of youthful commenters on MakeupAlley caught my eye:
scabooter said:
The Sephora site described it as a "mossy wood" scent. Are they on crack? It smells like somebody threw a bag of Jolly Ranchers into a field of flowers and poured musk on top.
This is a horrifying, bizarre combination of 12-year-old girl and 60-year-old lady in a way that does not harmonize to connote a playful yet mature woman. I would rather smell the Juice Bar body spray I used to wear in third grade -- or my grandma -- any day.
And this À La Recherché du Temps Perdu moment from ArretezCharlotte:
I bought this with birthday money on a whim when I was 14. I marinated myself in the stuff and wouldn't even go to Tesco's for a packet of crisps without spritzing both wrists and my neck generously with MDC. My former scent-junkie mother and Parisian father hated it with a passion and informed me on an almost daily basis how dirt-cheap it smelt. I loved it to death, thought it was the most sophisticated thing ever and that they were just a pair of boring old farts. Then one day, I caught a whiff of it on the cuff of my hoodie and it dawned on me that maybe it was a bit overpowering. Hell, Mama and Papa were right. It's been a half-decade since I wore it.
On the bus the other day, a girl who appeared to have bathed in this stuff sat down next to her boyfriend, who started coughing and asking her why the sweet baby Jesus she'd put so much scent on. She looked a bit hurt and said that she'd only done a couple of spritzes.
I cringed as I remembered that I used to wear twice that amount as a charmingly oblivious little bunch-haired, Dior-drenched turd of 14, and imagined the lung-crunching agony that my family and peers must have endured for that short period of my life.
I will never associate it with anything other than being 14. It's consuming lipgloss containers of vodka in the school toilets, it's skiving off Spanish and Geography to watch Titanic and 13 Going On 30, it’s walking through town dressed like a Disney film take on a hooker, it’s thinking that Britney's Do Something was God's gift to the eardrums of mankind, it’s wearing a mask of cheap foundation ninety shades too dark to cover one barely visible spot, it’s feeling too self-conscious to admit to finding some slightly goofy 40-year-old B-list actor far more attractive than Jesse Metcalfe.
Sometimes, there’s nothing more creatively stimulating than hating a perfume.
Miss Dior Chérie eau de parfum is available from Amazon.com, FragranceX.com, and FragranceNet.com, starting at $84 for 100ml
Well, I have to say that this one doesn't butter my muffin either, for exactly the reasons you describe.
ReplyDeleteEarlier this month I was put in an awkward position, when a friend who previously wore No 5 and L'Eau d'Issey (perilously stored at the head of her bathtub), announced brightly that her mum had given her MDC as a hand-me-down, as she didn't care for it herself. Nor, apparently, did my friend's 28 year old daughter... She asked me point blank what I thought of it and I mumbled something like: "I believe it is one of the scents most noted for having strawberry and popcorn in it."
Do you think I got away with it?
FS-I think that your solution was brilliant and far less verbose than mine. I would have launched into a tedious explanation of my preference for the original Miss Dior, taking time to explain the difference between the vintage and the current, sadly de-clawed formulation.
ReplyDeleteMy speech would have included my dismay over the lack of quality of most flankers, with no real acknowledgement that MDC is a flanker. If at that point, the friend still had the heart (and the lack of insight) to ask what I thought of it, I would have simply put my finger in my mouth and made retching sounds.
flittersniffer - heh, that's one of my evading tactics, too: spout a factoid rather than my opinion.
ReplyDeletemelisand61 - oh, and that's another mode of mine: launching into a tightly-focused, idiot savant analysis regretted by all.