I remember reading an interview with Meryl Streep ages ago where she said she never ran for a bus, because there would always be another one coming along pretty soon. (I agree with the spirit of that statement but there must be exceptions: I’d swallow my pride and run for a midnight bus if that were the last bus till morning.) I try to have the same attitude about discontinued or hard-to-find perfumes too: I’ll never run after one (crying at its departure, and pitying myself for not stocking up — how embarrassing!) Not too many years ago I would have added…“because another perfume will arrive to take its place.” These days, due to the restrictions on so many perfume ingredients in Europe, perfumes won’t be arriving that can take the place of old standards of perfumery. Most new perfumes can’t conjure the past convincingly, which leads me to the topic of reissues of venerable fragrances.

Guerlain Derby was created by perfumer Jean-Paul Guerlain and released in 1985. Sometime in the 90s, I bought Derby, unsniffed, and was not a fan (I gave it to my mother, who enjoyed it); recently I decided to obtain some vintage Derby and compare it to the current reissue in Guerlain’s Les Parisiennes collection. I hoped I wouldn’t love Derby, old or new, because the old sells for an average of $500 for a 100 ml bottle and the new is hard to come by…

Read the rest of this article »