Poison became the prototype for many fragrances from 1985 to 1989. “Yet, paradoxically, Poison invented nothing new,” declared Cosmetique News. “Before Poison, there had been Opium (1977). Marketing had been around for many years, initiated in the United States where, having few prestigious names, they orchestrated a marketing product to make their perfumes successful. As to the strength of the juice, it was far from being without rivals - consider Habanita (1924). On the other hand, Poison was a perfume of exceptional quality, and all its symbolic elements were advertised with arrogance and flair. It was also the first modern perfume to use all the media of its era.” 1

By the turn of the Eighties, Parfums Christian Dior was struggling. The progression of Miss Dior (1947), Diorama (1949), Diorissimo (1956) and Diorling (1963), through Diorella (1972) and Dior-Dior (1976) to Dioressence (1979), had thoroughly confused customers.

Since 1968, the perfume House had been owned by Moët et Chandon. While the new owners delighted in the prestige of Dior’s perfumes, they were more interested in acquiring Hennessy and expanding their champagne production. The Moët-Hennessy group’s attitude changed in 1981 when Alain Chevalier became chairman. “What is perfume but champagne set to music?” he asked, and promptly poached Maurice Roger from Sanofi, the cosmetics and pharmaceutical giant.

Roger started work on the new Dior perfume in September, 1982. His aim: to create a fragrance with dramatic impact, which would restore the dynamism of the Dior name. “I listened to women,” he told journalist Elisabeth Barillé. “I watched them live, so that I could create a perfume that would be totally modern and yet deeply transfused with mythical powers. When I had found the right formula, I didn’t ask for anyone’s opinion, even though I knew I was risking the company’s shirt. It was an absolute risk. From the initial to the final stages of the conception of Poison, no market research was done.” 2

Roger is convinced that there is no creation without risk: “You never know at the outset if a new creation will become a long-term asset, something that is constantly alive. But if a perfume is to last, it has to be a genuine creation. It must make a breakthrough and open new territory. If not, it’s an imitation. Poison, Fahrenheit, Dune and historical perfumes like Miss Dior and Diorissimo, have never been imitated because they were absolutely genuine creations.”

Roger believes that exclusivity is the second element essential to the building of a long-term asset: “The perfume has to be so exclusive that nobody can imitate you. Poison has never been imitated. It is so powerful, so enormous, that nobody can touch it.”

Another prerequisite for success, according to Roger, is that a new fragrance must fit the mood of contemporary culture: “ Perfume is substance and spirit. It must be a story, a myth, long before people wear it. If you don’t have noise and word-of-mouth, it doesn’t work, it has no meaning - it’s just business.”

Roger decided on the name Poison during the spring of 1983: “Before touching the fragrance, before giving any thought to the packaging, I tried to invent an emotional force. I was turning around in my mind that idea of seduction which is both love and aggression. I remember that I was willing to deal with Richard Avedon, because he did that fabulous photo of Nastassja Kinski with the snake. The real feeling of the snake, I would say, is seduction and love and death. That’s very powerful. As I was turning around that idea, I thought of names like Venom and things like that - and, suddenly, the name Poison came. Its impact was so strong, I was shocked. Nobody, of course, had beaten us to it. Nobody had been stupid enough to register such a name! Curiously, at that moment in 1983, I was also developing the name Dune.”

THE PERFUME
Created by Edouard Flechier of Roure Bertrand Dupont, now Givaudan

Roger insisted that several perfumers be brought in to work on the project. “Some houses have their ‘noses’,” he says. “I cannot agree with this approach, because to me it restricts the range of creativity.”

Marie-Christine de Sayn Wittgenstein, director of research and development, is the daughter of Serge Heftler-Louiche, founder of Parfums Christian Dior. She recalls that the fragrance development was approached from every direction: “Light, intense, floral, chypre. It was necessary to select from some seven hundred and eighty submissions from the most important perfume laboratories, such as Roure, IFF, Firmenich, Givaudan, and Mane. We did not give them any brief. The perfumers had carte blanche. At the same time, we were still looking for a name. When M. Roger thought of Poison, it was truly a revelation. It was so strong it lifted us. From that moment, everything became clearer.”

The fragrance had to satisfy a number of important criteria, says Roger: “Firstly the magic power of the name Poison imposed a mysterious, unusual, arousing feel on the fragrance. Not a venomous, black fragrance, of course, but more an amusing enigma. Secondly, to ensure the coherence of the project, we had to create a fragrance which would reflect the double-game aspect, the opposing values: surprising yet reassuring; vivacious yet deep; fresh yet sensual.

“Next,” he says, “we wanted a fragrance which would live and breathe the personality of the woman who wears it. We didn’t want a fragrance which would cover her like a suit of armour, completely masking her own individuality. Again, that’s very difficult to achieve. Finally, we had to meet the current needs for a lingering fragrance: once again, two difficult criteria to combine.”

Roger was determined to open up a new olfactory route, with an audacious blend of notes that no one had combined before: “It was a task of unprecedented difficulty, with many disappointments along the way. It was a little like polishing a precious stone into a jewel, with no certainty of success! Finally, we arrived at an exceptional fragrance which is completely original in the perfume world, and does not belong to any existing fragrance family. It really is an original creation, a scintillating, vibrant fragrance with spicy and floral notes; warm and sensual with fruity and musky notes.”

Roger steered the development of the fragrance from start to finish. Only he knew what he had in mind. “When we started on the brief in 1982, we had no idea of the new perfume’s name,” recalls perfumer Edouard Flechier, whose composition was finally selected by Roger. “We started by trying to find an important accord. We knew that it had to have great character, and be very strong. I remember working on three directions without any solution: one was sufficiently strong, but not in the spirit of what M. Roger wanted; another was so potent that there was little possibility of harmonising or domesticating its note; a third was too gentle. Remember, only M. Roger knew the name. We knew nothing about the name, the bottle or anything, until we were told we had won the brief.”

Flechier lost count of the number of trials it took to find the harmony which became the heart of Poison: “It was a strong musk accord with spices and woods on which we built the floral, fruity character. The floral notes came from rich naturals like tuberose, jasmine and rose, accented by rosy damascones and fruits.”

Flechier is quick to point out that Poison was the result of team work between Maurice Roger and Marie-Christine Wittgenstein at Christian Dior, Jean Amic, president of Roure, and himself: “We exchanged ideas all the time. M. Roger was always pushing us to go further. He wanted to emphasise the fruity character more and more. He wanted an extreme dosage of the fruit and spices notes, and a stronger, musky finish.

“Today, I do not think it would be possible to go as far as we did with Poison. The new perfumes are tame by comparison. I think that’s why Poison has become a classic, because all the classics have an extreme dosage of some component. Consider Chanel No 5, for example, with its overdose of aldehydes; Vent Vert with its jolt of galbanum; or Shalimar with its signature of ethyl vanillin. I think that a classic is characterised by an overdose of either an ingredient or an accord.”

Flechier admits that the name shocked him: “We never imagined that it would be as potent as Poison. It was such a strong name for a perfume. Poison was stronger than Opium, but it had the same power.”

THE BOTTLE
Designed by Véronique Monod

Once Roger had decided on the name Poison, all previous design ideas for the bottle were rejected. “They were all too light, or too nice and gentle to be Poison,” says Wittgenstein. “M. Roger wanted something that would be the event of the Eighties, so we went back to the drawing board to develop something more exquisite. We started by thinking around the name. Acid? Poisonous? Perhaps bitter? I remember M. Roger saying, ‘If it’s Poison, it’s an apple!’ But I didn’t see that. We worked instead on very dramatic colours, with the feeling of the Italian Borgias, very Wagnerian. Then in a jewellery shop I saw a very pretty necklace made of amethysts and emeralds. I thought that this would be a beautiful colour association. We imagined the bottle in amethyst. It had to look handmade.”

The designers were initially inspired by Maurice Marinot, one of the great glass makers of the 1920s. “We came across a photo of his work,” says Wittgenstein. “This was the mood we were looking for. Deep and mysterious. Subtle lines. Thick glass. Depth of colour. That was it! We researched Marinot’s work. Some of his shapes were incredible, but one drew our eye. So we started working on it. We were really enthusiastic. We thought we had it. But in the end, it was all a little too masculine, and we had to abandon the Marinot influence.

“Finally, we met Véronique Monod, a glass-blowing artist in the vanguard of the modern movement. We spoke to her, explained what we had done so far, the Marinot influence and every step we had taken. She understood that we didn’t want a gimmicky bottle encrusted with plastic bits. She understood the concept of very beautiful glass, the colour, the feeling of depth.”

Monod designs in the tradition of Marinot. “His work inspires me,” she says. “I usually produce heavy, solid and precious glass pieces, so I understood so well what Mme Wittgenstein and M. Pinoteau, her technical collaborator, wanted. Without knowing the name or smelling the perfume, I made two rough sketches which developed into the final bottle. My first idea, Volcan, was inspired by a volcano, and conveyed the feeling of violence rising up from inside the bottle. The second, called Pomme, was my interpretation of a precious Venetian vase. My final piece bound the two ideas together. By contrasting a small base with large shoulders, I made the bottle look strong but not heavy. The challenge, though, was to blow a shape big enough to look strong, but small enough to hold only a little perfume. I finally achieved the effect I wanted by making the glass walls of the bottle thicker, and inserting a small, hollow bubble inside.”

Dior admired the solid, heavy look of Monod’s flacon, its precious feel and unstructured shape. “It looks handmade,” says Wittgenstein. “The deep amethyst colour gives it a little mystery, the mystery of Poison. The stopper reflects the richness of the gold thread like a little light. When I showed the bottle to M. Roger, he said, ‘But it’s an apple!’ He was delighted. It was exactly what we had been trying to capture from the beginning. For the eau de toilette, we adapted it into a longer, slimmer shape, keeping the free form and the irregularities, the same shoulders.”

Now they had the name and the bottle. The next step was to develop the packaging. “Our first designs looked like an African print,” says Wittgenstein. “Very strong, very dramatic, but not right. Poison suggested venom, so we thought of snakes, but found the design a little frightening. We had looked at painters before, so why not again? One design was created by an abstract American artist, but it was not very Dior. Another artist gave us a swirling, mysterious-looking water design. We looked at a Matisse collage. It was lovely, but it didn’t have that touch of mystery we wanted.”

One day, the designer remembered the amethyst and emerald necklace. It was a perfect combination of colours, but the right shade of emerald fabric proved difficult to find. “By chance I found a piece of braid in a street market,” she says. “The glowing green colour seemed to marry perfectly with the amethyst bottle. The first photograph wasn’t bad, but somehow the depth and mystery were missing. Feeling somewhat dispirited, I gave a small swatch of moiré silk to our photographer and asked him to reproduce the colour of the green braid. But he didn’t get it quite right. The camera moved. ‘I can’t give it to you, because it’s bad’, he said, but I said ‘No, I like it much more!’ The movement of black and green had more character. It had the enigmatic look we wanted - deep, green, entirely modern - and the precious emerald matched perfectly with the amethyst bottle. It was the culmination of two long years of work.”

Now, finally, the myth was complete: the emotion realised; the essence composed; the dress designed. Rumour and noise were orchestrated in an eighteen month campaign costing forty million dollars, more money than had ever before been risked on a perfume launch. Success was immediate.

“Poison is one of the most revolutionary fragrances in history,” Maurice Roger says ten years later. “The cultural shock of its wave reaches the whole world. Nobody remains neutral!”


1    Cosmetique News (Paris)
2    Elisabeth Barillé and Jeanloup Sieff, Perfumes 1987, Societe d’Editions Modernes Parisienne     (Paris, 1987), p. 17

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‘Poison is original, bewitching and enigmatic: a vibrant blend of scintillating spices infused with the sensuous warmth of fragrant fruits and amber notes.’ Christian Dior

HEAD NOTES    Fruity        Orange blossom   honey   wild berries
HEART NOTES    Spicy        Cinnamon   coriander   pepper
SOUL NOTES    Ambery        Ambergris   cistus-labdanum   opopanax



Copyright © 1996 Michael Edwards.  All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the author’s permission.