It is funny that I should wear Derby on the same day that I see a disappointing house. The real estate advert portrayed an expansive 1,700 sq ft ranch with a 600 sq ft finished basement and a nice yard. The reality was a run-down home with frayed flooring, an ugly kitchen, pointlessly small bedrooms, and a disturbingly makeshift "finish" to the basement. On the outside though, it seemed quite nice, the quintessential middle class Connecticut home, the sort of place many people go to die.
Vintage Derby is rather like the house in question. Unlike other reviewers, I think the vintage bottle is a very pretty package, with Art Deco glasswork and a charmingly over-sized crescent moon cap. I don't have the bottle personally, just a sample, but if I were blind-buying a Guerlain, Derby would have a good shot with me. Luca Turin attributes Derby's commercial difficulties to the ugly bottle, but I see no reason why the original bottle design would have held back sales. It is interesting, and suggests the perfume is equally interesting. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Derby is a boring cross between a cheap nutmeg-based masculine like British Sterling, and an equally cheap rose/jasmine powder-puff drugstore feminine (take your pick of any of Coty's or Dana's). What elevates it above this pedestrian terrain is its high quality ingredients. The moss, nutmeg, jasmine, and light, slightly smoky wood notes are all delicately and finely rendered with excellent raw materials. But I'd rather hear a good song played badly than a bad song played well, and Derby is unremittingly bad, the sort of nutmeg-driven foghorn that makes faster fading alternatives like Dana's putrid British Sterling more desirable, unless you're a staunch lover of nutmeg. I'm not.
Reader, always be suspicious of a perfume that people tout as being "an unnoticed gem," an "underrated masterpiece." Derby has been in and out of production for almost thirty years, and remains a tough sell for Guerlain. This is not by accident. Its commercial sales figures aren't reflective of the ignorant masses. Many people, likely millions of them over the course of three decades, have sampled Derby and found it to be an off-putting nutmeg composition with a fetid and forgettably woodsy drydown. It's a smell they've rejected, which is why its market share is under duress. The world never came around to it, because there's not much to come around to. It ain't the bottle we should be blaming here.
A review of the current reissued version is pending.