1/17/24

Is Alain Delon pour Femme the Rarest Perfume?

I must confess, I've never seen a bottle of this in the wild, nor have I ever seen it mentioned online. Basenotes and Fragrantica do not have Alain Delon pour Femme listed in their databases, and while Parfumo acknowledges its existence with this blurry photo of a mini, there is no other information about it available. Well, except for this page (link).

As you can see, the asking price on myoldperfume.com is $320. No, that isn't a typo. That's what they want for a pristine "new" old-stock bottle. To be fair, this is what they want for most of their bottles. The site is Japanese, the merchant located in Yamanashi, just west of Tokyo, and they claim to keep their stock in climate-controlled conditions, the attention to detail we expect from Japan. Delon's perfume clientele were largely Japanese, for reasons beyond me, but he (and Charles Bronson, with his uncharacteristically weird and flamboyant Mandom commercials) were apparently popular there. So it isn't entirely surprising to find this impossibly rare vintage unicorn of a fragrance residing in such a faraway place. The site's managers claim the release date was 1981, which would put it one year after the original masculine release, which bore a similar box and bottle in a black and red color scheme. It's interesting to see, but $320? Really? 

The four ounce bottle is striking, the gold liquid looks clear and relatively light in color, indicating there has been no light contamination (heat contamination is another story, especially in Japan), but the sticker on the back says "AD-2006." The rest is in Japanese, and I can't read it, but I'm assuming it's an ingredients and safety/allergen label. If the number is a date, that would only make this particular bottle eighteen years old, meaning it isn't "deep vintage," and could even suggest it wasn't released that long ago, and perhaps only goes back to the 2000s. The thing about this is that it wouldn't necessarily negate the value, if indeed the asking price is accurate. This might simply be an insanely rare perfume, even if it isn't that old.