Jubilation 25 is Diorella with a trust fund. I was thinking about this the other night after swanning around in Amouage luxury all day–it goes beautifully with pyjamas and re-reading novels, by the way. My idea of luxury may be different from yours.

So I put some Jubilation 25 on one hand, late seventies Diorella on one hand. And then a splosh of vintage Diorama on my shoulder so I could turn and sniff that as part of the comparison. I’m not the first to make the connection–how could I be when it’s so very clear?

This is clearly one of the other exceptions to my anti-fruity rule (a rule which is clearly observed more in theory than in practice, because hello Mitsouko, my darling). Two more exceptions. (Three, damnit. Because Diorama too.)

Jubilation, like its Dior aunt, has a heart of overripe melon right on the edge of rottenness. But whatever Edmond Roudnitska put in, Lucas Sieuzac put in more. Of everything.

Jubilation 25 is just dripping with money, and every part of its warm skin, incense, fruit, and flowers is beautiful and voluptuous and strangely sinister at the same time. It feels like one of those seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas paintings of abundance–massive heaps of fruit and flowers, metal bowls glowing in candlelight, shining gilt-edged glass, plump game, possibly a lobster, and a cluster of metaphors to remind us of our mortality amid all that luxury.

first posted 3 April 2019