FÈVE DÉLICIEUSE
By CHRISTIAN DIOR
ingredients: bergamot, tonka bean, vanilla
Fève means “bean” in French, and the Dior PR breathlessly explain that this is a “personal representation of the tonka bean” by perfumer François Demachy. Materials listed are bergamot, tonka bean, and vanilla. On paper, this sounds very promising. Demachy’s talent for upgrading banal structures with excellent ingredients and tweaking everything until the fragrance comes “on song,” as engine tuners used to say, is unmatched. I was expecting an object lesson in luxurious simplicity.
Sadly, it doesn’t quite work. For a start, the material in the tonka bean is almost pure coumarin, so there is not that much difference between synthetic coumarin at a few bucks per kilo and the ultra-fancy, allegedly Venezuelan stuff in here. As for vanilla, we already know all about it. The single vanilla bean you buy at the supermarket in a little plastic tube practically has it all. Furthermore, we have been bombarded with coumarin-vanilla perfumes since the dawn of perfumery. Put in tonka and vanilla as search words in the Fragrances of the World database and it returns 6,700 entries—several hundred this year alone. There is, quite simply, nothing much left to surprise us in that accord: almost every oriental drydown uses these two materials.
All of Demachy’s skill cannot therefore rescue Fève Délicieuse from dismal banality. If anything sets it apart from its tribe, it is a short-lived top note, which smells floral in an unusually soft way by current—brutish—standards, and the fact that the drydown does not contain anything hideous. In short, Fève Délicieuse is an expensive version of a cheap perfume, like one of those little town cars offered with a burl walnut trim option for snobs.
boring beans
