2
Crippled by Wear Performance Issues
Bottom Line:
The 98lb weakling of the vaunted Dior Homme line. If interested in this one, find the pre-2013 version instead, which is superb. You could honestly stop here in this review, unless you’re just morbidly curious, as that’s pretty much everything you need to know.
Scent:
A generally pleasant, but noticeably artificial-smelling Lemon Pledge. That’s actually OK as I find lemons nice, but I don’t get anything else. If the Grapefruit Blossom or Musk accords really are in there, this scent doesn’t last long enough to showcase them.
The aroma is non-offensive, and simplistic, for better or worse.
Wear Performance:
This is the major deal-breaker, and the extremely poor wear performance skews the other measures to the negative.
The opening is the highlight, and not entirely bad actually. But sniff it quickly directly from your wrist if you want to enjoy your investment. That’s about all you’ll get, as the longevity is literally about 30 minutes, at least for me on repeated wearings. Based on others’ feedback, this appears to be the common experience.
Sillage is much the same, mild for the length of the opening, but it flashes off and goes away entirely in a few moments; Not becomes a skin scent, but dies, as in nada.
Wear Scenarios:
It’s hard to take the wear scenarios very seriously for this one, but in the interest of staying with my review format:
Spritz on immediately after a shower, or right out of bed in the morning, for a quick burst of lemony-freshness.
Post-gym scent.
Around-the-house wear while doing errands, re-spray liberally as needed.
Casual day-wear only, the happy bright lemons are fitting for warm weather and sunshine.
It’s not the best choice for night-time wear outside the house, or for anything else where the fragrance needs to last any non-trivial length of time, without re-spraying.
Work wear is out of the question, due to longevity issues.
Bathroom spray. Yes, really.
Other Notes:
Wow. What happened with this one, Dior? How did this one become the choice to supersede the very good previous formulation of Dior Homme Cologne? Honestly, it would’ve been better to have just killed the product, and let it be remembered fondly.
I’ve only experienced one other fragrance that suffers from the debilitating performance issues of this iteration of Dior Homme Cologne, and that’d be Clinique Happy for Men. It also happens to be a citrus cologne. They both have a promising aroma, which lasts literally minutes, and then rapidly trail off to nothing. That leads me to judge both of them “fail”, and a poor investment of funds.
There are other citrus-focused colognes that are fantastic and should be considered instead, where performance at least comes in at a mediocre level: Atelier Orange Sanguine comes to mind as being one of the better ones.
It pains me to pan a member of the Dior Homme line, which I find end-to-end to be probably the best overall men’s offering, inclusive of Dior Homme, DHI, Dior Homme Sport and even the original previous version Dior Homme Cologne (which was excellent by the way, and should be sought out instead of the 2013 formulation). Heck, I even have high hopes for the new Dior Homme Eau, based on early sniffs.
The bar is set so high by the Dior Homme line that it would be understandable for a new sibling to not “measure up”, but Dior Homme Cologne (2013) has to be judged a failure by almost any measure I can respect. I just have to write this off as an aberration, and hope this isn’t the future direction of this line.
The 98lb weakling of the vaunted Dior Homme line. If interested in this one, find the pre-2013 version instead, which is superb. You could honestly stop here in this review, unless you’re just morbidly curious, as that’s pretty much everything you need to know.
Scent:
A generally pleasant, but noticeably artificial-smelling Lemon Pledge. That’s actually OK as I find lemons nice, but I don’t get anything else. If the Grapefruit Blossom or Musk accords really are in there, this scent doesn’t last long enough to showcase them.
The aroma is non-offensive, and simplistic, for better or worse.
Wear Performance:
This is the major deal-breaker, and the extremely poor wear performance skews the other measures to the negative.
The opening is the highlight, and not entirely bad actually. But sniff it quickly directly from your wrist if you want to enjoy your investment. That’s about all you’ll get, as the longevity is literally about 30 minutes, at least for me on repeated wearings. Based on others’ feedback, this appears to be the common experience.
Sillage is much the same, mild for the length of the opening, but it flashes off and goes away entirely in a few moments; Not becomes a skin scent, but dies, as in nada.
Wear Scenarios:
It’s hard to take the wear scenarios very seriously for this one, but in the interest of staying with my review format:
Spritz on immediately after a shower, or right out of bed in the morning, for a quick burst of lemony-freshness.
Post-gym scent.
Around-the-house wear while doing errands, re-spray liberally as needed.
Casual day-wear only, the happy bright lemons are fitting for warm weather and sunshine.
It’s not the best choice for night-time wear outside the house, or for anything else where the fragrance needs to last any non-trivial length of time, without re-spraying.
Work wear is out of the question, due to longevity issues.
Bathroom spray. Yes, really.
Other Notes:
Wow. What happened with this one, Dior? How did this one become the choice to supersede the very good previous formulation of Dior Homme Cologne? Honestly, it would’ve been better to have just killed the product, and let it be remembered fondly.
I’ve only experienced one other fragrance that suffers from the debilitating performance issues of this iteration of Dior Homme Cologne, and that’d be Clinique Happy for Men. It also happens to be a citrus cologne. They both have a promising aroma, which lasts literally minutes, and then rapidly trail off to nothing. That leads me to judge both of them “fail”, and a poor investment of funds.
There are other citrus-focused colognes that are fantastic and should be considered instead, where performance at least comes in at a mediocre level: Atelier Orange Sanguine comes to mind as being one of the better ones.
It pains me to pan a member of the Dior Homme line, which I find end-to-end to be probably the best overall men’s offering, inclusive of Dior Homme, DHI, Dior Homme Sport and even the original previous version Dior Homme Cologne (which was excellent by the way, and should be sought out instead of the 2013 formulation). Heck, I even have high hopes for the new Dior Homme Eau, based on early sniffs.
The bar is set so high by the Dior Homme line that it would be understandable for a new sibling to not “measure up”, but Dior Homme Cologne (2013) has to be judged a failure by almost any measure I can respect. I just have to write this off as an aberration, and hope this isn’t the future direction of this line.
1 Comment
JManDave
