Dune Pour Homme Eau de Toilette 100ml

For warm weather and working days, Dior Dune Pour Homme Eau de Toilette 100ml is one of the more thoughtful options a mainstream house has put out for men.

The opening is fig leaf, which is worth separating from fig itself. The leaf is green and cool, with a sappy bitterness and a faint creaminess underneath it, and it gives the first twenty minutes a quality closer to a garden after rain than to anything edible. What follows is dry. Cedarwood brings the splintered, pencil shaving sharpness it always does, and sandalwood softens that from underneath with something smoother and milkier. The composition is short, just those three materials, and it does not pretend otherwise. There is a clear move from the green top into the dry base and then very little further change, which is worth knowing before you buy.

Olivier Cresp is credited with it, and 1997 is the year we hold. Worn at eau de toilette strength it keeps a sensible distance, lasting through a day at work rather than dominating it, and a couple of sprays is the right dose.

It reads as masculine without any of the usual signals, and it is the kind of bottle that suits someone who would rather be asked what they are wearing than announce it. Spring and summer are its natural seasons, and it does not become cloying in heat, which is more than can be said for most of what sits beside it on a counter.

The perfume and cosmetics side of Dior is an LVMH maison today. Christian Dior opened his couture house in Paris and showed the first collection in February 1947, with fragrance part of the plan from day one and the founder calling himself a couturier-perfumer.