Review: Dior Fahrenheit

Mention Dior Fahrenheit to anyone familiar with the scent and you already know their first impression -- gasoline, right?

Not for me.

Fahrenheit is my dad's signature scent. It is a scent I associate with going to church in the evening, the smell of my father in his Sunday's best, of solemnity and the cool night air. For me the fragrance bears the maturity of experience, the weight of authority and unwavering confidence. I put it on and I feel powerful, dark, and intense. And it will always have a place in my collection.

Only much later when I started reading up on fragrances did I start associating the effervescent heat of Fahrenheit's violet leaf note with the smell of gasoline. And only after smelling it on someone else did I realize that it requires a certain amount of masculinity to pull it off.

Gasoline ablaze

Dior Fahrenheit is very linear to my nose, opening with a smell reminiscent of the hazy air above a puddle of kerosene, and doesn't change much at all across its admirable longevity on the skin. It doesn't have a meaty, potentially cloying base to it's scent. Rather, it takes the form of a vapor-like sharpness just on the border of stinging, It doesn't have any real heat, but rather invokes the relation of it through association. I have tried other scents that have violet leaf, but no other fragrance puts it front and center and reinforces its fiery bite as boldly as Fahrenheit.

Because of my particular association with this fragrance, I can never think of it as a leather-jacket-wearing, Harley-riding, gasoline-soaked icon of masculinity. It certainly could be, as it has enough projection and sillage to be a beastly performer. But for me it has to be worn discreetly, like a darkly alluring fire at the very center of your personal space. Never reaching out and grabbing people by the nose, but rather tantalizing those that come near like torchlight in the night.

It's too polarizing for work, but I would wear it just because it smells so good to me. One spray to the chest, just enough for me to enjoy it drifting though my clothes and for anyone else to get hints of when they come close. No clean, white-shirted looks or boy-next-door innocence allowed. Fahrenheit requires masculine swagger to master, and anything less would seem like a teen wearing his dad's cologne.

Fragrance Name: Dior Fahrenheit
Release Date: 1988
Perfumer: Jean-Louis Seuzac, Maurice Roger