Diego Dalla Palma Diego Dalla Palma 1989

She probably just wants to close her eyes for a moment. Those eyes with whose gaze she can silence an entire room. As cool as porcelain, her upper arm touches the smooth fabric of your shirt, and although she lets her head sink onto your shoulder, you feel that residual tension in her neck that rarely leaves her completely. Barely noticeable, she watches under her lashes the cab's journey through the urban canyons, the trails of light gliding across the seats in a steady rhythm, wrapping around your limbs like an invisible ribbon, connecting you. You let your lips hover a few millimeters above her hair. Like a white-gold fan, it has spread over your shoulder. And yet you dare not kiss the crown of her head as a slight tug spreads through your chest, quickening your heartbeat.
She's bent her legs, slipped her heels out of her pumps just a little, and her skirt has slipped that fatal bit too far up, so that it no longer hides the place where her perlon stockings merge into the waistband. You know the down puff she uses to dust just a hint of powder on her thighs so the stockings don't leave welts. You know her as well as the purple outline that blossoms a few inches up her leg.
With the image in your mind comes the scent. Or was it the other way around? But how to describe the smell of Perlon on powdered skin? The steady motion with which the breaths lift and lower the contour of her chest in the drifting light? The relaxed posture in which her hand sank to the seat? The shine of the perfect ovals of her nails that now gleam so innocently and whose traces you could still read on your back ... The delicate glow of the fine skin on her neck ... The hint of a perfume she might have applied early that morning, that might or might not be No5, that has melted into her cool skin. No matter how hard you concentrate, you see the slight quiver of her lips. You know she's not asleep.

***

I like musky scents, I even like smelling them a lot, as long as they are not too laundry clean. However, there is actually always something that is foreign to me and dims my need to wear these scents myself. Either I perceive them too strongly or not at all, they are too clean or too encroaching for me - and when everything is right, I miss this little contradiction to which my attention can attach and which makes the fragrance interesting for me.
Diego Dalla Palma is different in this respect: here, a classic chypre structure is touched upon but not fully executed, floating ghostly in space so that it is hard to ignore, and yet remains so vague that it cannot be deciphered with an analytical mind. It's no secret that I have a bit of a soft spot for chypre scents and obviously, like here, I'm quite happy to be led around by the nose by them. But that is not all.
Within this structure, I think I perceive a hint of No5, which probably results from the iris powder-dusted Chanel triad of jasmine, rose and ylang-ylang, which is also listed here. But even these contours are ambiguous in a way that makes you want to trace them. I wonder if Marylin Monroe's sheets smelled like this in the morning, if she really wore just a few drops of No5 to sleep
The classical references are here, however, only decorative accessories for the musk that dominates the fragrance from beginning to end and just like Can, I also perceive the smell of perlon stockings here, although I'm not so sure if there's really a woman's leg in it. The slightly smoky musk in Diego Dalla Palma reminds me strongly of the smell when you open a pack of Wolford stockings - the unkitschy ones with the smooth waistband, although I assume that the ones with the toe might smell the same.

Too bad that this fragrance has been discontinued for far too long and is actually no longer to be found. Since I will probably have to do without a musk fragrance in my collection in the future.

Many dear thanks that I was allowed to get to know this so peculiar as beguiling fragrance, dear Pollita and dear Can777 !