Dior Aztec Chocolate and Lemon Balm – Swatch and Comparison

Dior Aztec Chocolate
Dior Aztec Chocolate

Dior Aztec Chocolate says it’s an online exclusive on Sephora.com, and it does seem to be a Sephora exclusive – I haven’t seen it anywhere else.  A lot of people have talked about how it’s similar to Dior’s Lemon Balm, which was a limited edition color and only available at Nordstrom last year.  Both of these colors are very complex blends of purple and brown with tiny shimmer in gold, green and red.  They’re both really pretty, and I have swatches and a comparison.

Both Aztec Chocolate and Lemon Balm are really full of shimmer, but when they’re painted on, the shimmer isn’t streaky at all.  The shimmer is so fine that it gives a really uniform look and isn’t so much sparkly as it is glowy.

Aztec Chocolate has the new, wider Dior brush and Lemon Balm has the older more conventional brush.  Both colors need three coats to be fully opaque, but the formula is nice and the application went quickly for me.

This picture shows my Dior Aztec Chocolate manicure, with a layer of Seche Vite on top.  It’s a deep, but cool brownish color that does look plummy in some lights.  To see just how close it is to Lemon Balm, I painted my index finger in Lemon Balm.  In these pictures, even I can barely tell the difference between them:

Dior Aztec Chocolate (with Lemon Balm)
Dior Aztec Chocolate (with Lemon Balm)

You can see that the shimmer in both is extremely fine, and basically the same.  I kept staring at my index finger during the day, in the shade, etc. to see if it looked any different to me.  I’ve concluded that the base colors for these two may be exactly the same, but the shimmer is slightly different.  If you stare at them side by side in really bright light, you can see that Lemon Balm has much more of the pinkish/red shimmer and therefore seems warmer, while in Aztec Chocolate the silverish/gold shimmer predominates, so it has a cooler look.  But both of the colors have both kinds of shimmer plus a little bit of green shimmer.  And the shimmer all seems to actually be the same color shimmer, too.  I’m wondering if they just tweaked the shimmer proportions using all the same components from Lemon Balm to get Aztec Chocolate.

Here’s a couple more pictures, again with Lemon Balm on my index finger.

Dior Aztec Chocolate (with Lemon Balm), shade
Dior Aztec Chocolate (with Lemon Balm), shade
Dior Aztec Chocolate (with Lemon Balm)
Dior Aztec Chocolate (with Lemon Balm)

Bottom line, the colors are very close.  If I had to pick just one, I would pick Lemon Balm as my favorite, since I like that it is ever so slightly more warm looking which makes it look a tiny bit more purple.  But you probably don’t really need both.  And if you missed out on Lemon Balm, you can pick up Aztec Chocolate from Sephora.com and have basically the same color.  It’s kind of nice to have that option because Lemon Balm is long sold out and can only be found on eBay now.

2 thoughts on “Dior Aztec Chocolate and Lemon Balm – Swatch and Comparison”

    1. It’s nice because Aztec Chocolate is now part of the permanent Dior lineup – it’s called New World Purple on the Dior site and Nordstroms. This is what the packaging always said, so it’s the same color.

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