Chantilly

I've heard around five times in the news that today, it's the birthday of Queen Elizabeth. Not that it mattered to me in any particular way but it prompted me to blow dust off the bottle of Houbigant's Chantilly.

Houbigant is a brand that has fallen deep. From supplying the court of France and England to a drugstore brand. The history is neatly summed up here. The main point is that after around 1994, Houbigant is an empty name.

I got Chantilly because I liked the icosahedron shaped bottle. The tag says Collection Royale and I haven't found such a flacon elsewhere so I don't really know. I guess it was a limited edition, the idea offers itself, but I have no idea when it was launched. the tag also says Blended in U. S. A. so it may be after the Houbigant brand was taken over by Dana. I have no idea.
Not rarely bottles are better than content but this wasn't the case.

Now, the fragrance. I was struck. It is old-fashioned in the best way, a generous bouquet of roses and other flora with a pinch of salty leather and spices and quite some oakmoss. It's pretty hard to discern the notes, the thing is very well blended. I read various descriptions of it, along the lines of Ptuiii, a grandma scent, boring soapy powdery ugly. I would agree only with the grandma scent, after all, good part of the Guerlain classics are grandma scents and grandma's grandma scents so what. When thinking how to describe the scent, words like lush, rich, glamorous, luxurious sprang into my mind. And happines and joie de vivre. I'll wear it for errands, and mind you, I'm far away from anything glamorous (1).
And... the drydown is all oakmoss and leather. It has almost mineral qualities and at least referring to inanimate nature seems to be a bit of a trend (Sel de Vetiver, Olivier Durbano's line, Lalique's rather uninspiring Amethyste...) so to hell with grandma scent.

Houbigant was launched in 1941, a creation of Marcel Billot.
Nowadays it is available cheaply all over the internet but I have no idea whether it's the same thing as mine.

top notes: fruity notes, neroli, bergamot, lemon
middle notes: spices, carnation, jasmine, ylang-ylang, rose, orange blossom
base notes: leather, tonka bean, musk, benzoin, oakmoss, vanilla, sandalwood

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(1) like, faded hoodie, secondhand jeans and I don't accept criticism. I don't care about clothes that much as long as they fit, last long, are comfy and black - which ends with expensive tank tops and hoodies that don't look the price, after all, I carefully remove all offending logos. I like to get up, pick whatever and be sure that it works.

Bois Dormant

I seem to be quite fond of antique fragrances. I suspect it's plain greed and snobbery, to have something nobody else has.
Anyhow, I got hold of a bottle of Bois Dormant. I wanted something else from the same seller but ended up with this one - I'm no stranger to irrational impulses. I didn't know what to expect from the fragrance so I didn't bother to expect anything; then one gets more surprise.

It took me quite a time to find out that what my brain classifies as 'powdery', is in fact chypre. And, Bois Dormant is one. I expected something junglelike, lush and dripping wet, like, say, Encre Noire. Or, on the contrary, something very woody, evoking the majestic forest of redwoods at the Californian coast. (1) Simply, something to go with the name of Sleeping Forest. I got a romantic autumn forest, not too dense, rather deciduous, with the specific aroma of dry leaves and a promise of spring flowers.
Yet, it's not a tame fragrance. The start is very green and pungent, I suspect galbanum and maybe artemisia, there is something bitterish about that note; after a while it gives way to a blend of aldehydes and vanilla. Or, I guess it's vanilla, certainly it's a sweet-soapy mix I haven't encountered yet. It is a multifaceted fragrance, yet after another while, the abovementioned sweet-soapy mix becomes a pronounced, slightly decadent rose with a whiff of resins.

Bois Dormant was created in 1925 by Raymond Kling (2) or in 1929 by Arturo Jordi-Pey and Raymond Kung (3) for the house of Houbigant (4), one of the most famous perfume houses... long time ago. Established in 1775, the house supplied many a crowned head but sadly, the company, including the formulas was sold a few times and whatever remained of the name of the house and it perfumes is falling to drugstore squallor. It always makes me sad to be aware that whatever rarity I possess, I'm one of the few lucky; although I'm aware that this fragrance, as many others, couldn't exist today (it's all those anal glands, IFRA regulations and who knows what), everything can be reformulated to at least resemble the old glory. I would like to give a recommendation of something similar yet accessible to give at least a vague idea but alas, I can't think of any.

On a different note, I made a handful of samples for my stay in Italy and I diluted a bit of Fougere Royale. Forgetting to describe the samples, I was left with several vials of approximately the same colour. Fougere kept that bitterness and civet stench despite being diluted in a crazy ratio around 1:30 - in fact, I was cleaning the funnel I used for making Helg's sample and I was pretty unwilling to waste even the tiniest bit. That's a decent perfume.



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(1) Kick my shin when you'll feel that my style is getting too close to Helg's.
(2) Says Perfume Intelligence.
(3) Says Museu del Perfum – Fundació Júlia Bonet
(4) Sources agree at least on this one.

Fougère Royale, a long lost legend

I read Luca Turin's The Secret of Scent shortly ago and got some food for thought. For those who do not know, Luca Turin is a biologist interested in smell and in perfumes and he writes about these, including the popular Perfumes: The Guide, written with Tania Sanchez.One of the bits of food for thought was Turin's enthusiastic description of Fougère Royale by Houbigant. Created in 1882, it's the first perfume that used a synthetic ingredient, coumarin, and Luca Turin describes it thusly:

It does smell of coumarin, to be sure, but it is also fresh, clean, austere, almost bitter. This is the reference smell of scrubbed bathrooms, suggestive of black and white tiles, clean, slightly damp towels, a freshly shaven daddy. But wait! there's a funny thing there, something not altogether pleasant. It's a touch of natural cuvet, stuff that comes from the rear edn of an Asian cat and smells like it does. [...] Small wonder Fougere Royale was such a success. At a distance, he who wears it is everyone's favourite son-in-law; up close, a bit of an animal (1).

It sounded intriguing enough to me; I have a weak spot of perfumes gone for long. Some two weeks ago, I gave it a random try on eBay and there it was, a small bottle and only half full but for a price I could afford; the seller guessed that it may be from the 1940's and I must say that I have no clue, I'm not that much of a collector - there was indeed a relaunch of this fragrance after WWII so I'd guess it's from this time. Should anyone know better, feel free to inform me.
Anyhow, it was affordable so I bought it out of sheer curiosity; if it were awful or gone bad, I was quite sure that I could pass the bottle to a collector friend. Decent deal. On Monday, an envelope from France landed in my mailbox, containing Cœur Enchaîne by Honore Payan of Grasse (another brand of which I know nothing) and that Fougère. The latter leaked a tiny bit, spreading the bitter scent into the wrapping foil and around.

It is bitter. And bitter and bitter, in all imaginable shades, bergamot that bites your nose off from inside. There's that adstringent feel of very strong green tea (2), crushed spruce needles - no resinous smell, rather an olfactory rendering of the taste of spruce needles, a whiff of something indefinably sweet-ish but not sticky... and, well, that piece of clingy foil does smell of something animalic after being around for several days. With a touch of dirty sea water in a port, with all that ugly floating on it (3). There is something soapy all over, not that pink soapy smell of roses but the sort of soap one uses for weird and tough stains. Bathroom - no way, for me, it would have to be much more homely to resemble a bathroom. An outhouse at a summer cottage, with gusts of wind between the boards and quite a bit of nature nearby. There are no clearly discernible floral accords as far as I can say but I'd guess quite some bergamot, a touch of rose and I wouldn't exclude iris and carnation...
This is one of those perfumes that I cannot compare to anything - I suspect there's something similar somewhere out there of which I'm unaware...
... I looked around the internetz and someone somewhere mentions Covet being a modern fougère, fougère 'on crack' and indeed, there is similar sort of biting pungency I originally ascribed to an overdose of muguet and bergamot. I loved Covet from the first time I sniffed it at Stockholm airport and now it scored another point in sympathy. It's not exactly similar but there's that feel.

Houbigant doesn't exist as a house anymore, the name was sold in the early 1990's along with the formulas for the perfumes and all that remained is names so (4), alas, there's hardly any chance of a reissue of either Fougère Royale or anything else from the good olden days... sigh.


Fougère Royale by Houbigant, created in 1882 (some sources give 1881) by Paul Parquet
Erm, could've tried to search first.
Top notes: lavender, bergamot, clary sage
Middle notes: geranium, heliotrope, rose, orchid, carnation
Base notes: oakmoss, musk, tonka, vanilla (5)
I suppose there should be coumarin instead of tonka and civet added.


Next time, or some other time: Chanel No. 46
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(1) Turin, Luca: The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell, p. 22. Faber and Faber, London, 2006. ISBN 978-0-571-21538-6
(2) I do drink tea and I have some general idea about it but that doesn't mean that I'd cease to be a coffee person. Should you give me gifts of this sort, I still prefer Peets coffee. Unless the tea were really really good. Really. I can stand crappy coffee but I hate crappy tea.
(3) I dislike sea in general, not only when it gets stinky.
(4) Something more here
(last) After basenotes.com